Pureed what?

While on vacation in Wisconsin I ate brats made from locally raised pigs, corn on the cob, various homemade jams and pickles. My Texas hosts fed me ribeye steak and steak fajitas cooked over charcoal.  No surprises there, I think.  I pitched in with cooking some breakfasts.  One morning I fed the crew bacon, fried potatoes, and scrambled eggs.  I will note here that one of the hosts is a vegetarian and was kind enough to let us make her house smell like bacon.

While it is always nice to eat food prepared by other people while on vacation I was happy to cook for myself when I got home.  While looking through my freezer I saw a bag of roasted green chiles from last fall so I decided to make green chile stew.  Since it was barely 100 degrees here last weekend the stew really helped take the chill out of my bones.  (This is the type of joke you make to make it through an Arizona summer.)  I also decided to make something new.  After paging through my copy of the Italian Country Table I decided to make fava puree.  Yeah, you read that right.  Apparently you can take dried fava beans and over cook them (with potato slices) and mash them up so they look a lot like mashed potatoes.  No really!  I wasn't sure how this would turn out given that as the beans cooked and I stirred the pot, what I saw was just a pot of beige water.  Yum?  It looked bad and I nearly tossed the pot's contents to start over.  However once the potato slices disintegrated and most of the water cooked out, the whole thing came together.  It still looks little gross in the pan, but it looks better when plated and drizzled with olive oil and pepper.  I'm not sure what I was expecting this to taste like, but damn it is was good. My version was pretty lumpy as some of the beans didn't get mashed up.  Not a problem though.  Wonder how long I will wait before I make this again using the leftover dry favas?

Pickle update:  So far so good.  They are a bit sweeter than I'd like but they survived the pickling process and taste good.