I like to make a point of going to the New Morning Farm farmer's market Saturday mornings and simply buying what looks good to me. It's fun then to find the right recipe for the ingredients.
Last Saturday they had "cheddar cauliflower," small little heads that truly were the color of cheddar cheese. I roasted it with butter and lemon per a technique in a Canal House cookbook I bought recently, and, together with a sautéed yellow squash we had around, put it over penne with a little grated pecorino. Pretty good.
I also got some fava beans. These were pretty late stage beans but I used a recipe from Sara Jenkins' Olives and Oranges for a salad with "spring" fava beans because she specified you could use more mature beans and blanche them to remove the tough skin. It's a bit labor intensive to first shell the beans, blanche and shock them, then pop them out of their skins, but playing with food is for me part of the joy of cooking. The beans get mixed with greens, herbs (mint, basil, parsley), and tiny cubes of pecorino and dressed just with olive oil and salt.
I paired it with a pork loin spit-roasted (felt like using the spit on my Weber grill) that was marinated in roast garlic and spike with springs of rosemary. The recipe from the Jamisons' Big Book of Outdoor Cooking called for fennel and onion to be roasted in the grill underneath the spit and then tossed with orzo. So it was a great little meal, with lots of leftover pork for later in the week. No chianti with these fava beans, but a nice Montalcino.
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