{"id":29,"date":"2004-07-03T11:53:45","date_gmt":"2004-07-03T15:53:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gastropoda.com\/stories\/2004\/07\/a-simple-smoky-solution\/"},"modified":"2007-09-03T12:52:13","modified_gmt":"2007-09-03T16:52:13","slug":"a-simple-smoky-solution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gastropoda.com\/stories\/2004\/07\/a-simple-smoky-solution\/","title":{"rendered":"A simple, smoky solution"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em><strong>Los Angeles Times<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<p><span class=\"body\"> Globalization is not always a bad thing. These days         you can go off to an Argentina-born friend&#8217;s birthday party in Italy         and come home with a California solution to one of the universal kitchen         mysteries: how to cook fava beans without seven hours of prep work.<\/span><!--more--><\/p>\n<p><span class=\"body\">            Before this revelation, I considered favas the Brazil nuts of beans.                 First you have to shell them, then you have to slip a tight skin                 off every single one. The naked legumes are worth the struggle,                 but you still wind up throwing out about two-thirds of what you             pay for with the whole pods. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span class=\"body\">            I saw the right way after walking into a kitchen in a Medici villa                 outside Florence where Judy Rodgers of Zuni Cafe in San Francisco                 was doing the hors d&#8217;oeuvres. Another guest shoved a plate covered                 with charred green things at me and said: &#8220;Taste this. They&#8217;re             amazing.&#8221; <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span class=\"body\">            The pods had just been grilled in a basket over smoldering coals,                 and the beans inside were soft and smoky. Essentially they had                 steamed in their husks; they had turned tender enough to eat                 like edamame, skin and all. We could even eat the oozy blackened             pods.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span class=\"body\">            Rodgers later explained her own epiphany.           She had been giving a tour of the Center for Urban Agriculture at Fairview           Gardens north of Santa Barbara during a teaching gig when one of the students asked what to do with the fava beans growing there and a           harvester responded, &#8220;We throw them on the grill.&#8221;<br \/>\n<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span class=\"body\">            It was an idea too weird not to try on           purists in Italy. Her method is to lightly oil and salt them and lay           them on a super-hot grill for a couple of minutes until they get &#8220;jail           marks.&#8221; (They take a little longer on a stovetop grill.) It may not           be as Tuscan as grilling radicchio, but you&#8217;re left with a finger food           as salty and satisfying as corn on the cob. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span class=\"body\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/gastropoda.com\/oldSite\/art\/dotted2.gif\" border=\"0\" height=\"1\" width=\"395\" \/><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Los Angeles Times Globalization is not always a bad thing. These days you can go off to an Argentina-born friend&#8217;s birthday party in Italy and come home with a California solution to one of the universal kitchen mysteries: how to cook fava beans without seven hours of prep work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,47,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-actual-cooking","category-favas","category-hard-made-easy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gastropoda.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gastropoda.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gastropoda.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gastropoda.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gastropoda.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gastropoda.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gastropoda.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gastropoda.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gastropoda.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}