Broad Beans

Broad beans are a fine thing - if you can bring yourself to buy the shapeless, unattractive pods and take on the time-consuming preparation procedure:

• Open the pods and remove the seeds
• blanch the seeds in salted water for 6 minutes
• Then score the thick skin and squeeze out the actual seeds. Goes something like with almonds.
• The seeds can then be briefly tossed in butter or added to the already prepared stew.

On Friday it was time again - the desire for bean stew in this unsummery summer outweighed the preparation inertia and at the Münster organic market I bought 1 kilo of the beans. Unfortunately, there was then for dinner spaghetti without beans, because the good pieces had become home to some pests. So by now there was a whole lot more protein in the bean than intended.

Perfidiously, you can hardly see this from the outside. The pests (or their parents?) bore through the shell of the pod with a very small opening. Only when you open the pod, you can see that something is wrong - most likely you can see it on the inside of the pod, there are black spots, which find their counterpart on the seeds - the entrance, behind which then hides a larva.

Smaller infestations can still be cut away, but in my case there was so much that I disposed of the whole kilo.

Lesson Learned - today at the market I had a pod opened at another stand to check the infestation. This time it was better, so tomorrow we can have a bean stew.

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