On my honor, I will serve mankind

Every summer, my husband and I load up the car with almost everything we own a travel-sized version of almost everything we own, to spend 9 days or so in the wilderness a campground. I truly am not exaggerating... our home away from home is a tent, our beds are air mattresses, and our dressers are suitcases. In lieu of a range, refrigerator, and kitchen sink, we have a stove, a dutch oven, ice chests, and dish pans.

It is roughing it without really giving up anything... just making the stuff all small enough to fit inside a car, and doing everything outside. Ideal, really. If there weren't these pesky things called a job for the adults around here and an education for the little guys, I might sell the house and camp year round. In that one place where it is summer year round.

While we are there, I spend the days relaxing, eating, tanning, swimming in the creek, eating, reading, hiking, eating, and drinking. In order for all that eating to occur I do spend a wee bit of time cooking. But in order for all that relaxing to occur, I try to make cooking pretty simple. 

One of our favorite meals comes from way back when my oldest brother was a boy scout, and it's called a foil dinner. Basically, you wrap some meat and potatoes up in foil and nestle it down in the coals of the campfire until it's cooked through. 

The other day I decided we didn't need to be camping to enjoy foil dinners. We went ahead and did them in the kitchen, and popped them in the oven. Although we weren't following up a day of hiking and swimming, or eating in the great outdoors, they tasted pretty darn good.

Tradtional Boy Scout Foil Dinner in a non-traditional setting:

First, you need to chop up your veggies into bite-sized pieces. The usual suspects would be potatoes, celery, carrots and onion. However, you can use whatever you have on hand. I, of course, used those veggies that came in the box this week.

zucchini, corn, bell pepper
fava beans, potatoes, leeks
(to prep the fava beans for cooking, read this)

Next, get out a sheet of foil for each person who will be eating. Place a patty of ground beef on each foil. The ground beef should be on the shiny side of the foil, so that when you fold it up, the dull side will be out. I am not sure why this is, but the boy scouts say to do it this way, and who is going to argue with a boy scout?

Next, let each diner select his or her vegetables. They should be piled on top of the ground beef willy-nilly. Then sprinkle it with salt and pepper.

Now, fold each dinner into a packet. This should be done carefully if you are going to be putting them into a campfire, so that you don't end up eating ashes. 

As you finish preparing each packet, be sure to have the diner write his or her name of the outside of it, so everyone gets the exact veggie combination they created. Or in the case of our family, I draw pictures of everyone. The kids love it. 

May I present to you, my lovely family:

So sorry the pictures look so bad. It turns out it is a little hard to photograph something that is wrinkly and reflective.

It's a good thing we all have distinctly different hair in my family. I am a terrible artist, so the faces look identical.

Once you have marked the packets in a way that will differentiate them from one another, it is time to let it all cook. If you have a good set of coals in your campfire, place the packet in them for about 30 minutes or so, depending on how much meat you use, the heat of your coals, and the air temperature. Feel free to check on them if you need to, as long as you wrap them back up again. If you are doing it in an oven like we did this week, heat the oven to 400 and cook them about 25-30 minutes on a baking sheet.

Here is the magic of it all. No matter which vegetables you use, no matter what the ratio of veggie to meat is, no matter whether you eat it with 40 boys scouts or your own family, no matter whether you are in the dining room or a campsite, it turns out absolutely delicious. Every time.

Kate and William: I have a suggestion for your wedding dinner

As promised... the exciting culmination of the fava bean story.

As I showed you yesterday, it takes a whole lot of fava beans to make a whole lot of almost nothing. Yummy almost nothing, that is to say, but still.

Each bean pod produces 3 or 4 beans... and those can vary widely in size, I found. Some of the fava beans are tiny cute little guys. Meaning that it takes about 10-12 beans of various sizes to make a forkful... or 4-5 whole pods! For one fork! And if you plan to eat ... oh say, 8-10 bites of fava bean, for each person at your table, you had better be buying ...wait, let me do the math here... 10 billion gajillion infinity trillion and seventy fava pods. And another refrigerator to keep them.

At any rate, after I took my beans from the pod and the casings from the beans, I had enough vegetable matter left for a decent portion for two people. (And a family of five.)

Oh well, no matter. The beans are here, they're boiled, and de-cased. 

In my readings about fava beans, I had learned that they are much more commonly eaten in England. As soon as I heard that, I was inspired to allow them to accompany a typically Bristish meal. Bangers and mash it is!

The best part about making bangers and mash is that you get to say bangers and mash all day long. When you run to Costco with a friend you can explain that you are buying sausages for your bangers and mash. When the kids ask what's for dinner, you get to say bangers and mash. When you call your husband at work, you can tell him that the bangers and mash will be ready at 5:30. When your mom calls to ask what you're doing, you can tell her you're cooking bangers and mash. It's awesome. 

Bangers and mash is basically sausages and mashed potatoes and a kind of thin gravy-ish stuff.

We all enjoyed our bangers and mash quite thoroughly. Pip pip and tally-ho. 

The kids actually raved about it. They say they want bangers and mash for dinner much more often. They emptied their plates and asked for seconds of bangers and mash. My husband actually sent a text message (because, of course, by the time he ate dinner I was already gone at a baseball practice) just to rave about how great the bangers and mash was.

Wait... who knows what I'm forgetting about here? THE FAVA BEANS!

All I did was to take the prepared fava beans, and saute them for about 10 minutes in some butter and garlic. They were good. Really mild, buttery, yummy. All the things they were promised to be.  But not a huge impact as you can see:

Bangers and Mash

And fava beans.

Really, they are there. Over there in the corner. 

And so, how to make bangers and mash:

4-5 potatoes

oil

8-10 sausages

1 onion

2 Tbsp. flour

1 quart chicken stock

4 Tbsp. butter

2 Tbsp. milk

2 Tbsp. sour cream

2 Tbsp. brown mustard

Peel and dice a four or five potatoes. Place them in a pot, cover them in cold water, and let it come to a boil. This will boil gently for about 20 minutes, or until the potatoes are soft and yield to a fork.

While the potatoes cook, begin to cook the sausages. Place a little bit of oil in a skillet, and brown the sausages on all sides, turning occasionally.

Once the sausages are browned, remove them from the skillet. Slice the onion and add it to the skillet. Stir this often, and cook until it is all soft. Add the flour, and stir and cook for a minute or two, until the flour is distributed and starting to toast. Add the chicken stock, put the sausages back in the pan, and let it all simmer for 20 minutes, or until the sausages are cooked through.

Meanwhile, the potatoes should have finished boiling. Drain them, and add butter, milk, sour cream, and mustard.  Mash it all together. If the potatoes are too dry, add some of the gravy that the sausages are cooking in. 

Serve the potatoes with the sausages, and all of it swimming in gravy.

glove away (because all I have to give away is love)

Fava beans look like something your neighbor has to rake up every summer.

This is about 1/3 of my fava beans. Remember that fact later.

They take about as much work as raking a lawn, too. As a matter of fact, when I researched how to cook and eat the fava, every single entry begins like this, "Although labor-intensive..."

Labor-intensive? Eh? They better be worth it!

At any rate, all the recipes went on to say that they are worth the extra work, delicious, buttery, the new rage,  blah blah blah.

Since I have the favas here, and since they only way to eat them is to go ahead and do all the prep work, I decided to just jump into it and enjoy it.

Luke, I am your fava.

First, you pull the beans out of their pods.

This part feels like something you should do in South Carolina,  sitting on the porch with a glass of lemonade, while somewhere in the neighborhood someone plays a banjo, and neighbors stop by on their way home from work. Since I couldn't orchestrate all that, I did it in the kitchen with my husband and a glass of wine. It was almost as good.

Removing the beans from their pods will reduce an entire crisper-drawer's worth of fava bean pods into a very small pile of fava beans.

Once you have all the beans out, put them in a pot of boiling, heavily salted water for about three minutes.

After three minutes, plunge them immediately into an ice water bath. I add the emphasis because every.single.recipe. uses the words "plunge" and "immediately". They make it seem like such a dire requirement. As if tossing them quickly into the ice water would result in favas that are suddenly laced with arsenic. At any rate, don't lose any time. Just do it, okay?

You would think that all of this shelling and boiling and plunging would have the beans cooked, wouldn't you? Au contraire, mon frere.  

The fun is not nearly over yet.

Next, you have to take each one of the little guys and slip him from his warm little sleeping bag. This will leave you with a pile of fava casings to throw away. But before you do, take a minute to appreciate the beautiful pale green color. Sherwin-Williams should name a paint color after them. I would buy "fava-bean-casing green" for my home. Wouldn't you?

"Pale green pants with nobody inside them."
If you can identify the story and author of this quote,  you will be the winner of my first ever giveaway. The prize is my unending love and appreciation. Just leave a comment below with the correct answer to enter. (Mom, you don't count.)

Ahem. I digress. The beans do slip easily from their casing, resulting in an even smaller pile of beans.  They are very cute, very green little guys.

Now, for my first ever cliff-hanger. Come back tomorrow, and I will tell you what I did to make the beans, which are now (finally) edible, into something you would want to eat.