Grow – Cook – Make

The apricot crop is here, for real. Last week was just the first taste. Now we are going to the orchard twice a day looking for the ripest apricots to take home.

Actually, my husband is the one picking fruit, filling his basket with Floragold (this photo and the next one) and Tomcot apricots (the first photo). I am just taking pictures. I am having too much fun with the camera and I am too short to reach most of this fruit anyway.

This week — maybe also next– will be apricot week at our home. We’ll be eating them fresh, we’ll be making jam, making tarts, adding them to our cooking, and to our desserts. There will be enough to freeze for the winter. All of that provided that our rodent control contraptions work. So far so good, I’m keeping my fingers crossed…

For more delicious pictures and stories of harvests and to add your own, head on over to Daphne’s Dandelions, host of Harvest Monday, and take a look at what other gardeners have been up to this week.

Last Sunday I picked my last fava beans for this year. The exquisitely delicate favas of early spring are long gone. Now I have on my kitchen counter flavorful,  starchy beans, that hold their own paired with other strong flavors. To celebrate this year’s abundance of favas and to say goodbye to a vegetable I so love, I’d like to share with you in the next few posts the ways we are enjoying them right now.

Let’s start with with the largest and starchiest favas. We’ll make a spread for toast or crostini, which we can turn into a dip for chips or even a soup, if we dilute it a bit.

Late Season Fava Bean Spread

• A cup or two of fava beans, skinned. Shell the favas. Drop them in a pot of boiling water for a couple of minutes. Pop them out of their skin when cool to the touch.
• 1/4 to 1/2 cup of your favorite olive oil
• Herbs from the garden: mint, rosemary, oregano, thyme, whatever you’ve got…
• Chile powder to taste. I used a Velarde chile powder from New Mexico. I like smoked paprika from Spain too. Use your favorite.
• A few cloves of garlic, to taste. I just used one or two cloves of Inchelium Red from my freezer, since last year I got some very pungent garlic.
• Salt

And now that your favas are ready and you’ve gathered all those ingredients, put them all together in a food processor or blender and press the button until you like the consistency. Scoop it into a pretty bowl and serve it with mini toasts, crackers or chips.

This is all there is to it, or almost all. I like to start blending with about two tablespoons of oil and add more little by little until I get the consistency I’m after. For a spread I want it thicker so I’ll add less oil. For a dip I’ll add more oil so it is a bit more liquid (substitute water for some of the oil if you are concerned about calories). If I want to make a soup, I’ll use some olive oil, but I’ll add mostly vegetable or chicken broth, lots of it. Keep tasting, adding broth and adjusting the seasonings until you like the soup.

I am sure there are more variations of this basic fava spread that one can come up with. For instance you can also dice some bacon, fry it with some onions and blend it with everything else to make a deeper and richer soup, or you can add some cream to it. Try different flavorings, try different proportions and consistencies. It is hard to go wrong with this late season fava spread-dip-soup.

I am coming back home from the studio, walking up the hill in the last light of the evening.

A monkeyflower bush reaching towards the low sun.

I am glad I have my camera with me.

The first apricots.

The last lime on the tree.

The first zucchinis.

The last favas.

The last garlic, the softnecked Inchelium Red. It will last a long time, I hope, until next year’s crop is in.

We are leaving spring behind and starting to enjoy summer. The seasons are turning, the year plows ahead and my tomatoes are not ready. Oh, well, I have zucchinis. It’s a start. Summer seems be a bit slow this year, but it’s coming, it’s coming, I know, I did get a few zucchinis today.

For more delicious pictures and stories of harvests and to add your own, head on over to Daphne’s Dandelions, host of Harvest Monday, and take a look at what other gardeners have been up to this week.

I have spent most of the day working in the garden today. Not much to show for it, some seeding, some harvesting, lots of maintenance, fixing, straightening, tidying up. Necessary stuff, but not the kind of work that inspires me to go get the camera and tell you a story. At the end of the day I had had my fill of busted rodent barriers and clogged irrigation emitters, I needed some beauty to get lost into and my veggie garden was not the place to find it, not today, not in case I find yet another burrow that I need to do something about.

Between the last garden beds and the compost piles there is a path that meanders down to my studio. Halfway down the path, to the left, between two large boulders and across from some live oaks, I found my little bit of beauty, the purple sage bush.

I know it is a Salvia leucophyla and S. clevelandii hybrid but I can’t remember which one. It was planted many years ago and it thrives without any care, a chaparral plant that it is, happy with whatever it gets here, in the chaparral.