fava beans Archives - Fix Me a Little Lunch

Easy Baked Chicken Breasts

written by Ali

Last week was one of those weeks that I just didn’t feel very enthusiastic about anything, particularly cooking. By Friday night, I was just tired – it had been raining all week, and as much as I love rain and love the PNW, I’m not a huge fan of this occasional season called Juneuary. Sometimes, even a PNW girl needs some sunshine. All of this is a long way of saying that on Friday, I just wanted to make an easy dinner, curl up under a blanket, have a glass of wine, and just be done.

Fortunately, I have just the recipe for such a situation. Easy baked chicken breasts are just that: easy. They can be accompanied by all manner of roasted veggie, including potatoes, green beans, cauliflower, and my personal favorite, fava beans. I had fava beans from the farmer’s market from the previous Sunday, and I have an abundance of herbs in the garden right now, so all of these combined, along with a little bit of easy focaccia, made for the perfect weekend night meal.

(Showing off my herb garden – all in pots and all doing better than I expected).

This is designed to be an easy meal for two, but could easily be adjusted to make more.

Easy Baked Chicken Breasts
Serves 2

2 boneless skinless chicken breasts
2 – 3 tablespoons finely chopped herbs (I used basil, rosemary, oregano, thyme and parsley)
2 or 3 finely chopped garlic cloves
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 teaspoon salt
A few grinds of fresh pepper

Preheat oven to 450 degrees.

Combine the herbs, garlic, olive oil, salt and pepper in a small bowl. Put the chicken breasts on a foil lined baking sheet and spread the herb and oil combination over them with a spoon.

You can also put vegetables on the baking sheet with the chicken – just keep an eye on them as you cook the chicken as they may cook at different speeds.

Bake the chicken for 20 minutes or until the internal temperature reaches 170 degrees.

June 26, 2016 0 comment

Appetizers Farmer's Market Snacks

Roasted Fava Beans

written by Ali

One of my most favorite spring vegetables is fava beans. I distinctly remember first becoming aware of favas through reading my mother’s Martha Stewart magazines. Martha uses lots of fava beans in her magazines and cookbooks and I often wondered what made them so wonderful. I equally wondered where on earth you would find them fresh. The farmer’s market I used to go to in Denver didn’t have favas, and then I spent several years overseas where so many fruits and veggies were a rarity, and then four years in New Mexico, where I ate lots of green chili, but no favas.

When I moved to Oregon, I found favas in a market an hour away from our home and greedily bought about a dozen. I was then faced with the question about what, exactly, to do with them. I have no idea where I found the very easy preparation of roasting fava beans with olive oil and salt, but it is so, so very easy and makes these somewhat complicated veggies very accessible. For a very, very brief period of time, there was a farmer in my little rural town in Oregon who grew favas in the spring – I’d buy heaps of them and we would gorge ourselves on the roasted beans. That farmer, unfortunately, decided it was more profitable to go to just one farmers market in the region in the early spring, so I was left fava-less for several seasons.

Now we are in the Portland area, and in a last resort, we can always go to Whole Foods and similar markets for produce. I gasped with delight when I saw these the other day when we were out looking for greens for our salad. I’m also hoping for favas to show up at the farmers market.

If you have thirty minutes, olive oil, salt and fava beans, you can easily throw these beauties together.

Roasted Fava Beans
Serves 2

12 fava beans
1 tablespoon olive oil
1/2 teaspoon sea salt

Preheat the oven to 450 degrees. Put the fava beans on a baking sheet in a single layer. Drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle with salt. Bake for 12 minutes and then flip the favas. Bake for another 12 minutes. The favas should be soft and golden.

You can pull the beans out of the fava shells at this stage or eat the whole bean – shells and all.

March 25, 2016 0 comment