Broad Beans - Habas con jamón

Habas con Jamón   (Broad beans with serrano ham)

The following recipe uses Spanish serrano ham - cured, air-dried Spanish ham (prosciutto in Italian).  The term serrano comes from the Spanish word, sierra and means "from the mountains" 

There are variations of this dish, such as habas con chorizo, using chopped chorizo instead of ham, broad beans with pancetta/smoked bacon or a mixture of Serrano ham and chorizo.  In Murcia, I have also had habas con morcilla (Spanish black pudding). Broad beans are very versatile.

Ingredients
For a starter for 4 people or as a side dish you will need

50 mls olive oil

500g of fresh podded broad beans*

100 - 200 grams Serrano ham (or similar)

2 shallots (or one small onion chopped or similar quantity of spring onions sliced)

2 cloves garlic

1/2 glass white wine or fino sherry

sprig of fresh oregano and fresh parsley

Salt and freshly ground pepper

If the broad beans are fresh and young, there should be no need to pre-cook them (*frozen broad beans work just as well). If the beans are a little older you may need to steam them for a couple of minutes before adding. If they have passed their best and a little pale - like the chef - they can be steamed for two minutes and then the outer shell removed and discarded to reveal bright green beans within.

Add the oil to a frying pan and gently fry the onions and garlic till softened. Add the chopped ham and heat gently for 5 minutes - add more olive oil if needed.  In the UK I use finely sliced ham cut into small pieces but if you can buy the ham (jamón curado) in a piece, it can be coarsely chopped,  In Spain it can be bought ready chopped rather like lardons.

Add the beans and half glass of wine or dry sherry and the chopped oregano and continue on a low heat for 10 minutes. (Cover if you have a lid) Season with freshly ground black pepper (and salt if needed - but the ham may be sufficiently salty itself). If the dish looks too dry you can add half a glass of water and or oil during this final cooking stage.

Stir and serve garnished with chopped parsley.

Variations - Use Chorizo instead of Serrano ham - or a mixture of both. If using chorizo, chop finely and fry gently before the onions to extract the oil from the sausage. Also, if using smoked bacon or pancetta, fry this gently before adding the onion.

Oregano or marjoram goes well with this dish but you could try mint or garnish with mint instead of parsley.

And if you don't have broad beans, try this dish with French beans or flat/runner beans - Judias con jamón- but the beans will need to be steamed before adding to the dish.

The great thing with this dish is that you can vary the quantities - more garlic, more beans, different herbs, longer cooking times.........

......good cooking.

John Austin

Santa Pola, Spain, August 2018

Broad Beans - Fūl midammis (ful medames)

 Fūl midammis  -  

Middle Eastern dish using dried fava beans

Ful medames (Mudammas)  is a spiced fava bean “stew” often eaten throughout the Middle East and North Africa. There is evidence of ful in Egypt dating back to the 4^th century and I have read  that the beans were buried in large pots in the ground – mudammas means "buried", hence the name.

Besides being inexpensive and easy to prepare (although a lengthy process if using dried beans) it is a very nutritious and filling dish often eaten for breakfast. It is slow to digest because of its high fibre content, so it releases a steady stream of energy for several hours after consumption, keeping hunger at bay for longer. For this reason it is a popular dish during Ramadan for suhoor,(sohour) the meal served before sunrise and morning prayers.

Ful is packed with goodness -  lots of protein, antioxidants, vitamins B1, B6 , B9 (folate/folic acid) and minerals,iron, copper, manganese, calcium, magnesium and is one of the highest plant sources of potassium.  The absolute essential is dried fava beans, but some recipes may also add lentils (which help to thicken the sauce) or even chickpeas.

Dried fava beans from my local Middle Eastern deli

We have several Middle Eastern shops nearby but if you don’t have one or cannot find dried fava beans in your grocery shop or supermarket you will probably find them in a Turkish shop where they may be called Bakla.

The cooking time will vary depending on the quality and age of the beans but usually they will need 2 – 3 hours.  If you cook more than you need, they will keep for up to a week in the fridge.   Pour the excess cooked beans into a container with an airtight lid and let it cool.  When cold pour the juice of one lemon on to the surface.  Put on the lid and store in the refrigerator until needed.

The essential ingredients are dried beans, olive oil, lemon juice and garlic but almost all versions also have cumin.  Here is my basic recipe which will be more than enough for 4 - 6 people or will keep in the fridge for several days.

Essential ingredients

300g dried broad (fava) beans
150 mls olive oil
juice of two large lemons
1 tbsp ground cumin
2 - 4 garlic cloves, peeled and crushed

Method

Rinse the dried beans under running cold water, place in a large bowl and cover with fresh water. Make sure there are two to three inches of water above the beans as they will absorb a lot - and leave to soak for several hours or overnight adding more water if necessary.

Rinse the cooked beans with cold water and drain.  Place the beans in unsalted water in a large saucepan and bring to the boil, then simmer with the lid on until tender, about 2 ½ to 3 hours - adding more water if necessary to keep them covered during cooking.

When the beans are tender, remove the lid and continue simmering to reduce the liquid or pour off any excess liquid – there should be enough to coat them but they should not be swimming. Remove two tablespoons of cooked beans, mash them and return to the pan and stir. This will thicken the sauce. 

Remove from the heat; add half the oil, half the lemon juice, the cumin, garlic and a teaspoon of salt. Adjust seasoning to taste adding more oil, lemon juice or salt as required.

It can then be served warm, possibly topped with chopped tomatoes and parsley.

A Ful breakfast

Variations

When the beans are cooked it is possible to add other ingredients. (If you can’t be bothered to soak and cook the beans you might find some ready cooked, canned or bottled which will save a great deal of time and fuel!)

It is generally acknowledged that the original ful was an Egyptian dish but there are now many national and regional variations and some would claim it as their national dish.

You could add finely chopped onions that have been cooked gently in olive oil until soft (with or without the addition of chopped tomatoes or tomato paste) which can be stirred into the beans with the cumin. Some recipes add crushed coriander seeds as well as cumin.

You can make spicy tomato ful by adding 1 tablespoon of tomato paste or passata and 1 teaspoon of harissa paste or half teaspoon of chilli powder, cayenne, or chilli flakes.

Another possibility is Tahini Ful.  Add 1 tablespoon of tahini paste mixed with 1 tablespoon of lemon juice. There is also a variety in Egypt of Butter Ful where 1 -2 tablespoons of butter are stirred in to the final mix.

Usually it is served with warmed flatbread and often with hard boiled eggs, halved or quartered on top or with olives and tomato salad, or cucumber and yoghourt or for a more authentic Middle East dish, labneh.

As you can see it is a very versatile dish so you can experiment with your favourite herbs and spices and create your own signature dish.

Good cooking!

John Austin

Hove, August 2018

Broad Beans

Broad beans - they're my faves!

(Thanks to Caroline Bull for the headline pun)

Broad beans did not feature in my childhood diet and yet they have come to be one of my favourite vegetables.  My wife, Sylvi, had also not experienced broad beans in her childhood diet but first came in contact with them in the early stages of secondary school in biology lessons on reproduction - the sex life of the broad bean.  My encounter was later, in botany in the lower sixth, when we were studying negative and positive phototropism and geotropism - but I still hadn't tasted one!  They weren't included in school dinners and I had never seen them in the local greengrocers or the Co-op.

I think my first taste came in my early twenties and I wasn't greatly impressed as they must have been rather old - they were dry, fibrous and fairly tasteless.  Soon afterwards, however, I discovered younger ones which hadn't been boiled to death and I became an ardent fan.

In my late twenties, I discovered that they were easy to grow on the allotment which I then had in Charlton.  Like most allotment produce, a lot come all at once when friends and neighbours become beneficiaries - but fortunately, broad beans are one of the vegetables which freeze well without impairing either the texture or the flavour.  You just need sufficient space in the freezer.

The pictures below are of last year's crop in Hove.

I have tried sowing them in November/December and February/March.  November sown beans will crop two to three weeks before those sown two to three months later - but the great advantage is that they usually crop before the blackfly arrives.  This year the crop from the ones sown last November has been excellent but the February/March sown crop has been a great disappointment.  I think that in future I will sow more broad beans but only in November.

In view of the favourable comments about my broad beans from friends in France, Spain and Italy, I decided to devote a blog to this great leguminous vegetable. In France they are known as fèves, in Spain habas, but faba in Galicia and faves in Catalonia and Valencia and also faves in Italy.

Broad beans are very nutritious.  Fresh beans, whether cooked or raw, are a good source of folic acid, iron, manganese and dietary fibre. Fresh or dried, they have no saturated fat or cholesterol and contain a high concentration of thiamin, vitamin K, vitamin B-6, potassium, copper, selenium, zinc and magnesium. They are also an inexpensive source of protein. 


Another plus is that, when growing, broad beans have a symbiotic relationship with nitrogen-fixing bacteria in the soil which thrive on nodules on the beans' roots.  Nitrogen from the air is converted into other nitrogenous compounds which are deposited in the soil and which will benefit both the growing beans but also next year's crops that are grown in the same spot, without the need for artificial nitrogen rich fertilizers.  This is one of the reasons why crop rotation (which I wrote about in January) is so important.

In England, broad beans tend to be served plainly boiled or steamed as a vegetable accompaniment to a main course. In Spain they are often treated as a dish in their own right - often cooked with serrano ham as habas con jamon - one of the most delicious tapa, or with chorizo. In Murcia, I have had habas con morcilla, broad beans with black pudding (blood sausage) - and good it was!

Dried, they have been an important part of the food supply across the Middle East and north and east Africa for centuries. In Arabic they are alfawl, and appear in recipe books and menus as fawl, fool, fūl, fuul or foul - most notably seen in the famous Egyptian dish, Fūl midammis  (or just ful or ful medames), eaten widely across the Middle East at breakfast time. Egyptian falafel, taameyya/ta'ameya, said to be the original are made with fava and not chickpeas.

The basic ingredients of fūl are soaked and cooked dried fava beans with olive oil, garlic and cumin. There are very many regional adaptations and it is a classless dish.  I have eaten fūl for breakfast in Aleppo, Damascus, Cairo, Amman and various places in Lebanon and Palestine as well as a side dish in Ethiopia. I have eaten fūl in 5 star hotels, hostels, on the street and in refugee camps.

Fūl may have many added ingredients such as chopped parsley, onion, lemon juice, chili pepper or harissa, Za'atar (Zatar/Zaatar) and other vegetable, herb and spice ingredients.

I am posting two recipes - one using fresh beans, habas con jamón and one for dried beans, Fūl midammis.

freshly podded broad beans from the allotment

dried fava beans from the deli

John Austin,

Hove, August 2018

OUR ALLOTMENT - Life on The Weald June 2018

Life on the Weald, June 2018 

June is very much a month for harvesting with an opportunity to make some late sowings.

We have had several pickings of raspberries - the taste was excellent but because we have had one of the driest couple of months on record they were not as plump as last year....

the first raspberries of 2018

....but they were delicious

The raspberry canes are a bit choked by couch grass in some areas so may need digging up and replanting in the autumn.

Our redcurrants looked reasonably well, having been moved from Mile Oak in the autumn

Sadly the birds (I am assuming it was birds and not poachers) stripped the lot before we had time to pick them. Building a fruit cage is onbviously a task for the autumn.

The outdoor cucumbers which I bought from the Allotment Holders' sale were looking good at the beginning of the month but need some encouragement to actually climb up the netting which I have provided.  The ones I grew from seed are just a couple of inches high.

Cucumbers 11 June

Cucumbers 26 June

Although we have been watering regularly, the lettuces are beginning to bolt.  Some were grown from seed planted in the winter and having survived the cold and the wet at the beginning of the year, it would be sad to lose them now.

One crop that seems to have done very well is the onions and we will be harvesting and drying them off later this month or next.

Onions - Autumn sun

Red Onions - Electra

In the meantime a spot of hand weeding is required!

I have managed to clear a raised bed to sow some dwarf French Beans which hopefully will be up next month.

Raised bed ready for the French beans

Meanwhile the runner beans seem to be surviving the drought

And we have erected a new frame for some climbing French beans (and planted a pumpkin in the middle of the rows).

The purple sprouting broccoli has been planted out.  We have protected the plants from pigeons with mini-cloches made from plastic bottles and will keep a watchful eye for caterpillars.  The plants look very vulnerable!

What we had hoped was a Globe Artichoke is regrettably a Cardoon.  It's very decorative and no doubt will be stunning when the flowers open - but its not an artichoke!  Its over 2m tall and has a spread of 2m so it is taking up a lot of room and no doubt depleting the soil of water and nutrients.  So, sorry but it has to go.

Cardoon

The courgettes, marrow and pumpkin plants are all looking good.  I bought the plants from the Allotment Holders' plant sale as the ones I had grown from seed had all been eaten so I am not sure what varieties they are or which are the marrows and which the courgettes!

I have planted them in what was an overgrown wilderness of couch grass, nettles and bindweed next to the cardoon, where the previous plot holder had grown cabbages and sprouts and obviously some Duke of York red potatoes which we keep unearthing!

Courgettes and marrows

And at the end of the month we had the first courgette in flower.

Courgette in flower

We have harvested our peas - Kelvedon Wonder - and they were so good we have made some more late sowings of both Kelvedon Wonder and Boogie.

Our first peas - best eaten from the pod!

June was the month to dig up the first early potatoes and the first to crop were the Rocket variety.  This is supposedly the earliest cropping variety but various sources suggest it is not best for flavour.  They are right.  They do not taste like the freshly lifted new potatoes I remember from my youth.  They are just bland potatoes.  They also don't look like new potatoes as they are the size of baking potatoes!

Early Rocket potatoes

They do seem popular with slugs though!  Many were pitted with large holes made by slugs -some were still in residence but most had been vacated only to be re-occupied by woodlice!  I lifted one plant of later Charlotte potatoes to see if they had suffered the same and they had not.  Speaking to my colleague and fellow plot holder, Simon, I discovered he had the same problem and only his Rocket potatoes were affected by slugs and not the other variety he had planted.   Well, that's one easy decision - I won't be growing Rocket again.

We had a few surplus seed potatoes, Vivaldi and Nicola, and some old plastic recycling boxes in which we made some late plantings - so hopefully will have some new potatoes before Christmas! And we are making sure they are well watered.

Earlier in the year I had planted a mixed collection of lettuces bought from the garden centre and we have lifted our first from the crop and it was very good - lollo rosso.

Our first Lollo Rosso 

There is still no sign of rain in what has been the driest June on record and at the end of the month we're off to Spain!  Bad timing.  Urgent need to recruit volunteers for watering duties.

John Austin

June 2018, Hove

OUR ALLOTMENT - Life on The Weald May 2018

Life on the Weald, May 2018 

One of the consequences of living by the sea is that children, grandchildren and the wider family and friends visit quite often.  This was an intended consequence and we love having visitors but we do tend to lose weekends on the allotment!

We hadn't done as much preparatory work as we should in April as we lost a whole weekend for the London Marathon, then we went away for a week to coincide with Sylvi's birthday and then my daughter and family came down for a weekend (although it was so wet and miserable that in all honesty we wouldn't have ventured to the allotment).

In May, my eldest son and family visited for the early bank holiday weekend and shortly after we disappeared for a week to Spain.  The weather for the early May holiday was extremely good and whilst we neglected the allotment, we made good use of the garden

We also got the barbecue out for only the second time this year and also put the smoker to good use with smoked pork ribs and a slow smoked been joint. 

Chicken and lamb kebabs

smoked beef and pork ribs

Surprisingly though, we grabbed a few hours later in the week and got some work done on the plot and its looking reasonably good.


On my first visit of the month I was pleased to see that the rhubarb which we had transplanted had taken well.

rhubarb

And in those dark November/December days I had sown some winter lettuces in seed trays at home.  They had germinated indoors but spent January and February outdoors before being planted out in March.  I was surprised to see that they had survived!

Vailan, winter sown lettuces

The peas were also doing well......

Kelvedon Wonder peas

 ...........and the broad beans sown in March were coming along.

Meteor broad beans

 Early May and the blueberries are in full flower...........

Blueberries

............. and the apple is in blossom.

We also had signs of the first gooseberries in early May 

gooseberry 4 May

And by 25 May we had a prolific crop

Sadly, two days later the entire crop had disappeared - squirrels? pigeons? herring gulls? We just don't know.  Unlikely to have been people as they weren't ripe.  But next year I will have to think of netting them.  We lost our entire crop of blueberries last year so netting them is a priority for this month.

The first early potatoes are doing well...

First early Rocket potatoes - 4 May

Vivaldi and Charlotte first early potatoes - 4 May

At the beginning of May, the pond was covered in pond weed and there was no evidence of frogs or toads returning, but the water irises planted last year are looking good and hopefully will flower this year.   If there are no signs of our amphibians returning by the end of the month, I think I might import some spawn or tadpoles.

Garden pond and irises - 4 May

We still have plentiful supplies of chard and perpetual spinach, some of which is beginning to go to seed.  There are also bluebells everywhere.

chard and bluebells - coexistence

We have had a good crop of broad beans from the Aquadulce sown in November

Sowing in November gives a crop a few weeks ahead of those sown in February/March which usually means they avoid blackfly - and sure enough the ones sown in February are now infested.

I have repaired the frame that I built for last year's tromboncino and have used it to make a frame for the runner beans.

I confess that I haven't grown them from seed but bought some plants from the garden centre and supplemented them with some bought from the Allotment Federation's plant sale.  I also bought some courgette plants from the plant sale but am not sure of the variety.  I have cleared the jungle where the sprouts and cabbages grew last year and had to dig out nettles and brambles and it will be a challenge to keep both under control.

By the end of the month the water iris was in flower

But still no sign of any frogs or toads.  By chance someone on the local "Nextdoor" social media site was offering tadpoles so I collected some and transferred them to the pond

By the end of the month we were harvesting Broad Beans and Peas and the raspberries were just beginning to ripen. Looks like we'll have a good harvest in June.

John AustinHove, May 2018