Sunday was no exception. I stopped by to get some arugula for salads, and grabbed some adorable eight-ball zucchinis while I was there. I eyed the prodigious pile of fava pods on one table, but thought about my schedule for the week, and saw no windows of opportunity for the slow, meticulous process of prepping the beans. Instead, I grabbed a bundle of mint, and went to check out.

“I would have grabbed some of the favas, but I’ve got no time this week to deal with them,” I told the Happy Boy Farms worker.

“Have you seen our recipe over there?” he replied, nodding in the direction of the pile. “You can roast them, and then just eat them like edamame.”

I walked back to the pile, and indeed, there was a laminated article that featured what looked like the easiest recipe ever. Roasting has become my very favorite way to prep vegetables, but it had never occurred to me it would work with favas.

Indeed, it does. Peeling, blanching, and peeling some more? Only if you’ve really got the time. But if you’re like the rest of us, or you don’t have a sous chef, here’s one way to enjoy these seasonal beans without missing whatever you had scheduled during the season.

There’s not really a recipe needed. Just fire up the oven to 450 degrees, and wash the beans thoroughly.

Toss the beans with olive oil, salt and pepper.

Spread them out in a single layer on a baking stone or sheet.

Roast them for 25 minutes.

Let them cool enough to handle, and then remove the beans. Eat them out of hand, or use them in your favorite fava recipe.

Want to learn more about roasted favas? Try one of these stories:

• Sophie Brickman’s San Francisco Chronicle column about roasting fava beans
• A16′s Whole Roasted Fava Beans by Shuna Lydon of Eggbeater
• Announcement: Fava Bean Season Has Arrived! by Ariel of Confessions of a Modern Day Farm Girl

• Slow-roasted tomato dip
• Roasted cauliflower
• Kettle padróns
• Slow-cooked roast beef with fresh sage and dried tomatoes
• Getting Zen with pearl onions

While she was off gallivanting around the neighborhood, I pulled the vegetables from the crisper and realized I had some baby padróns that I needed to cook. “I’m making them as an appetizer,” I said when she arrived back at the apartment. I sautéed them up in olive oil, and dumped them in a bowl to add salt.

At this point, Fatemeh was mixing a marinade for the pork. “One of these days,” she said, gesturing at the bag of brown sugar on the counter and then at the peppers, “I want to hit those with that and caramelize them.”

“Do it,” I said. “Now.”

She tossed some brown sugar into the hot pan, and I dumped the blistered padróns back in. “Can I add salt to them?” I asked.

“Of course,” she said, in the tone that finishes the sentence with the implied dumbass.

“Kettle padróns,” I said. “We’re making kettle padróns!”

We made them, and then we ate them. All of them. With our fingers. While standing up at the counter.

“The kettle padróns were gone in under five minutes. We have a problem,” Tweeted Fatemeh. “Either that or a business plan.”

Kettle Padróns
(Serves 1-2, hastily)

1 pint padrón peppers (No need to seed or stem them…)
2 Tbsp olive oil
1 ½ Tbsp brown sugar
½ Tbsp kosher salt or sea salt

1. Heat the olive oil in a sauté pan over medium-high heat. When the oil is just about to smoke, toss in the padróns. Sauté them until they’re starting to blacken and blister.
2. Add in the brown sugar and continue stirring for about three or four minutes, until the sugar’s melted and starting to brown.
3. Transfer the caramelized peppers to a bowl. Add the salt.
4. Eat the shit out of them. Then email me and Fatemeh and thank us for this discovery.

• Year-round farmy goodness
• Roasted cauliflower
• Roasted fava beans
• Store-grown padróns
• Tomatoes, at exactly the right time

Hi. I am doing a guest post. I am 7 years old and I have a garden. I first got interested in gardening when I looked at my fairy book, and it showed how to find Flower Fairies by planting flowers. The Fairy Garden was a bunch of flowers planted in a tub. I watered it every other day and then it was doing well. I checked on it every day and once I saw a fairy in it! She was small, had hair to her shoulders and purple wings. She had a dress made out of petals, and she had bare feet and a hat made from an upside-down purple flower. I wrote a note to the fairies, and in the morning, on the back of the note a fairy had responded, and it said “Thank you” in big curvy letters.

Then I got interested in planting other things. This year I am planting tomatoes, lettuce, and zucchini, and I am going to plant a pumpkin. And my yard has a baby lemon tree and a tall fig tree, and the lemon tree has a lemon that is almost ripe. And the fig tree has a bunch of little figs. I like to eat the figs right off the tree. I also like eating cherry tomatoes and strawberries right off the plants in my yard. And there are also lots and lots of different types of flowers in my yard.

The first thing I harvested this year was lettuce. I never thought that I could grow lettuce that well! Salad is always better from your garden than salad from the store, because if it’s grown in other parts of the world, it has to take a long trip on a ship to get to the store. But if it’s in your garden, you can just have the salad without having to buy it from the store. The lettuce was delicious!

I hope you like my guest post!

[Note from my coworker: She protested eating salad before last week when she tasted the first lettuce she grew herself! Even her older brother eats salad without complaining now, which wasn’t the case before! Peaceful dinners: one more reason home gardens rule!]

• This is not a salad
• Guest post: A garden out of control
• Lettuce give it a try
• Colorful! Crisp!
• The lettuce is not plastic

I know. I sound like I’m Methuselah or something. But I swear to you, this is brutal stuff, and I haven’t even started talking about mosquitoes. Or earwigs.

This is why I squealed with delight when we rounded the corner of a house in Alameda during the Bay-Friendly Garden Tour and spotted a whole series of raised beds. And I’m not talking just slightly raised beds, people. I’m talking way the heck up.

OSHA would be proud. These beds? Utterly ergonomic.

Not only that, but my OCD tendencies positively purred when I noticed the elevated wooden beds had perfect little square boxes that held each plant.

And there were maps that charted out the whole planting pattern.

Now, my OCD side loved this, but the other side of me, the side that, some days, decides there is really no reason to make the bed nor hang up my clothes, shuddered a little bit. I don’t know that I could necessarily make a plan that involved rows and rows of perfect lettuce.

OK, maybe I could make the plan. But executing it would definitely be harder. Even at a comfortable, ergonomically-correct height.

• Bay-Friendly Garden Tour Highlights: Edible Kitchen Garden
• Friends don’t let friends use tape measures
• Snow and ice and Lenten sacrifice
• The unscented tomato seedlings of Home Depot
• Green explosion

The garden itself features artichokes, lettuce, berries, leeks, and a bunch of other tasty plants, and pretty flowers border each bed to help attract pollinators.

I think this just about describes my heaven. Ditch the lawn and start eating from right outside the front door? Brilliant, and perfect.

My very favorite detail of all? It had to be the use of wooden utensils as plant markers.

Spoons and forks dotted the beds, the name of the edibles carefully written on them in black ink. They were adorable, and this is definitely an idea I plan to steal for a future garden.

• Further punishment
• A-pee-logy required?
• 2007 resolutions
• Bay-Friendly Garden Tour Highlights: Raised Beds
• The secret garden, part 1

Growing heirloom vegetables in large pots can be a great way of showing them off, because after all, they are some of the most interesting conversation pieces in the edible garden. Each year I try to grow a few things in pots, often mixing veggies with ornamentals, and they do get comments.

I’d like to suggest a few things for spring, and some hot crops for the summer.

First, I’d plant some greens in those wine barrels right now. You could get a season’s worth of lettuce in one and European greens in the other. The nice part is they’d be up, eaten and out before the really warm weather hits, so you could then use the same pots for something else. With less than full sun on your patio, the pots should stay cool enough for the greens now, but in the summer you’d want to stay away from veggies that need lots of sun, like big beefsteak tomatoes or peppers.

Here are a few favorite lettuces from my book Edible Heirlooms that complement each other well and would be beautiful all jumbled together:

Black-seeded Simpson. The classic of green leaf lettuces, it has light green, curled leaves that are crisp and juicy. It also holds up well to drought (a danger when planting in a pot) and heat.

Forellenschluss. This is an old Austrian variety that translates as “speckled like a trout,” so you can guess that it has bursts of red and maroon freckles splashed upon a soft green field.

Green Deer Tongue. I know it doesn’t sound appetizing, but these arrow-shaped, olive-green leaves are succulent and a bit more hearty than some of the delicate leaf lettuces.

Here are a few favorite heirloom European greens:

Arugula. You might think of this nutty, peppery green as “yuppie chow” that was developed in the ‘80s, but it was being eaten by the colonists. The wild variety, Sylvetta, might be better in a pot, as it doesn’t get quite so large.

Rhubarb Chard. This is the mildest tasting chard, and one of the most ornamental. Also known as Ruby Red, it has crimson stalks and leave that can get dark green, almost black.

Corn Salad. Also called mache, it’s a very tender green that does well under many conditions. The variety Verte d’Etampes has a thicker, more succulent leaf on a compact rosette.

I think you could get a lot of colorful spring salads out of those. For the summer, why not try a cherry tomato in one of the big pots, and perhaps a bean trellis in the other.

Yellow Pear Cherry Tomato. This is one of the oldest tomatoes in America, a descendant of the Red Fig, which was the first tomato listed in the first U.S. gardening book. Fruit can be pear or fig-shaped, and they’re both meaty and juicy, making it almost the perfect cherry tomato.

For something different, try my second-favorite: Chadwick’s Cherry. I call this a “new heirloom” because it’s not that old; it was developed by Alan Chadwick at UC Santa Cruz in the 1970s. However, it’s a glorious, large, round cherry that I am certain will pass the test of time and be handed down for generations to come.

Painted Lady Scarlet Runner Bean. You might need some tall bamboo poles to satisfy this vigorous bean – it’s a “runner,” after all – but you will be wowed by the presentation. Its flowers are pink and red with white centers, named by English gardeners in honor of Queen Elizabeth I, who reportedly liked to put on a lot of makeup when she appeared in public. The flat bean pods can get up to 10 inches long, and can be eaten fresh or dried and used later. And check this out: the bean climbs its string or pole counter-clockwise. Amaze your friends!

Around the base of these summer veggies could be planted some heirloom flowers to complement them and bring in the beneficial insects.

Hope you have a great summer in your new place, and I look forward to seeing pictures on the blog!

ps: For some more ideas, a slide show and even some free seeds, come to my talk at the San Francisco Flower & Garden Show on Friday, March 26 at 3:45 p.m. Come up and say hi!

Photos provided by Bill Thorness

• State of the greens
• Yellow-bellied tomato plant
• Holy bean leaves, Batman!
• State of the pepper
• Bean reprieve

One of the offers came from a coworker, who told me she had a variety of heirloom tomato seeds and some Tokyo onions, a varietal that she described as somewhere between a green onion and a leek, and that is excellent when doused with brown sugar and soy sauce and thrown on a grill until caramelized.

“We pretty much throw them in the dirt and they grow,” she said.

“That sounds like the right kind of plant for me,” I replied. “I’m definitely in.”

A few days later, she popped her head back in the office. “I’m afraid I’ve communicated incorrectly about the seeds,” she said. “I may have been unclear.”

I assumed that she was about to tell me she didn’t really have any seeds, and that I was pretty much SOL on that front. I have one of those minds that makes up the story in absence of any sort of facts, so sure enough, I was already figuring out which one of my other friends might be able to share some of their seeds.

“I can’t give you seeds,” she said. “I’m going to have to give you seedlings. I already have them all started.”

Good people of the Internet, I cannot emphasize enough what LITTLE problem this is. Someone else will have done the work for me. For all intents and purposes, this is like going to a store and buying seedlings, except I don’t have to buy them. All I will have to do is throw them in the dirt in the wine barrels and call it done.

Of course, there is no dirt in the wine barrels yet. So, there’s that to be taken care of. Ahem.

• Help at the hardware store
• The tomatoes. I planted them.
• Three bags full
• Space-age tomato seedlings
• A bit of a water retention problem

At the end of the weekend, on my way home from the airport, I stopped at my local Whole Foods, a behemoth of a store in itself, and certainly a bastion of its own panoply of processed foods. Let’s not kid ourselves, right?

But I was psyched to find, there in the produce section, sandwiched (oddly) between two different kinds of radishes, a pile of bunches of beautiful baby golden beets from Happy Boy Farms, a local producer that I buy from at the farmers’ market almost every week.

Sure, it was Whole Foods. And sure, it’s California. But the fact remains that, in this country, the food producers getting the tax breaks, the government support and attention, and the most shelf space in most American grocery stores are the industrial producers, not the smaller, local guys like Happy Boy.

This week, though, you have an opportunity to help change that balance. This week, Change.org is hosting a crowd-sourcing competition called 10 Ideas for Change in America, and the top 10 ideas will be presented to relevant members of the Obama administration. Even better, Change.org will mobilize its grassroots network to support those 10 ideas.

Among those ideas? Slow Money, a radical idea to fund real, healthy food by investing in small producers and local farmers. The return on that investment—for our environment, for our health, for our food security—is certainly more than any results I’ve seen in my 401(k) lately…

The voting on the top 10 ideas runs through Friday, and I encourage you to go over and check out the options. I’d love to see Slow Money make it into the top 10, but there are other great ideas that will improve food systems, including the American Farmland Trust’s effort to save ranch and farmland across this country, and an effort to put a garden at every school.

Don’t delay. It’ll take about five minutes of your time to promote 10 ideas you think can change the world, and maybe change what’s on the shelves at your local grocery store.

• How you can help Midwestern farmers
• How to save community food programs in two easy faxes
• Menu for Hope underway today
• Act now, and pledge to end hunger
• Tomorrow, declare your Food Independence

The Cottage Industrialist’s monthly calendar highlights seasonal produce and recipe ideas to put those seasonal fruits and vegetables to their best use. And best of all? It’s a free download. Just find yourself a color printer and start putting these whimsical pages to use.

Only January through June is available right now, but the rest of the year should be posted soon. So go! Download!

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I recommended the recipe to my coworker, Kim, the day after I made them. “I love sweet potatoes,” she said. “I’ll have to try it.”

Then Kim told me a story of a recent sweet potato experience she’d had at their house, one where she’d baked four sweet potatoes the requisite amount of time in the oven, but one of the four refused to soften up. The other three? Perfect. The fourth? Rock hard, no matter how long she left it in the oven.

We could not figure out why that would be. Anyone out there know the scoop? What dread disease or state of affairs would cause a sweet potato to remain impervious to the heat of the oven?

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