A few months after Gloria died, I was very excited to find broad beans. Actually, at about the same time, I found broad beans, and I also found seeds to *grow* broad beans! The local grocery store got in some broad beans, which prompted me to start searching for the seeds. Which I finally found.
Broad beans, also known as fava beans, are a seasonal rarity in the produce sections of grocery stores. (Yes, yes, I know, all *you* know is "Fava beans and a nice Chianti." I had a vague idea that "fava" beans might have been broad beans harvested when slightly younger or less mature, but fava just seems to be another name. Younger beans can be eaten pods and all. But we'll get to that, later.) In fact, in the major chains, you probably never see them at all. (The seed packets that I found are labelled "heirloom" seeds.) You generally only find broad beans once a year, if at all. They are harder to find, in the stores, than raspberries. Probably due to the rarity, they are expensive, and then, when you do get them, you seem to waste a lot of them, since you have to throw away what seems like three pounds of pods, just to get a half a cup of the beans, themselves.
Gloria loved broad beans. Actually, I don't know if she liked eating them all that much. (I know I didn't cook them the best way.) In an excess of caution, I tended to boil them for at least half an hour, based on a vague knowledge that *some* bean varieties, if you don't cook them enough, contain an astonishing quantity of toxins. (I never knew about "double podding" until I did some research while writing this.)
What Gloria really loved about broad beans, I suspect, was that her grandfather grew them. He always had a garden, wherever they lived, and broad beans were one of the things he grew.
So, I found some seed packets for broad beans. The articles I read say that they are easy to grow. I put some broad beans into four of the gardens I did that year. And they grew in all four, although successfully in only one.
The research that I did on broad beans, at that point, generated another grief burst. I've never been any good as a gardener, and we couldn't do much in the townhouse anyway, but, apparently, broad beans can be grown in pots. (As long as they are big pots.) So, the whole time we were married, I could have grown broad beans. And we could have experimented with the various stages of them. And I let Gloria down. Yet again ...
Broad beans have two theological points to make.
The first is God's wide-ranging and somewhat lavish provision for us.
The second is yet further proof that God is not interested in efficiency.
Let's start with the lavish provision.
First of all, the new growth, even after the plants start producing beans, can be eaten either raw as greenery and salads, or cooked as you would spinach or cabbage. So that's one form of provision. Then there are the bean pods themselves. When they are between five and ten centimetres long, they can be picked directly off the plant and eaten like snow peas. They're not quite as sweet as or flavorful as snow peas, but they definitely are edible at that point.
However, of course, most people are going to wait until they get actual pods with actual beans in them. This is where part of the observation about efficiency comes in. When the bean pods do get to the size where they are actually producing beans, it doesn't seem to matter how big they get: most of the time you still only get four beans out of a pod. And you're taking the pods and throwing them away.
No, you don't actually *need* to throw them away. Some people, even with the pod husks, will fry up those husks as a kind of a snack. I haven't tried that yet, but a lot of people do say that you can do it. Then, of course, there is the parable of the prodigal son. At one point it mentions that he would fain have eaten the husks that were fed to the pigs but no one gave him any. (So, you see? I *have* got a Biblical reference in this sermon!) Broad beans are one of the oldest cultivars that mankind has grown, and those husks that they fed to the pigs were probably the outer pods from broad beans. They still have some nutritional value, and definitely the pigs ate them, and starving prodigal sons would have liked to have eaten them, even though they were probably a bit fibrous and possibly tasteless (without being fried).
You can, of course, eat the broad beans at this point. That's the way I cooked them for Gloria for thirty years. Which, of course, was wrong, or, at least, limited. The inner husk of the bean is not a particularly pleasant flavor, although it does have some minor nutritional value. But most of the time what you want to do is double podding.
Once you've got the beans out of the outer pods, you then boil or blanch them for between one and three minutes, depending upon which websites you trust. You then immediately plunge the boiled beans into cold water to loosen the other husks even further. At this point you can remove the inner husks relatively easily, although it is a bit of a tedious process. You simply squeeze the beans between thumb and forefinger, and the inner bean shoots out and you are left with the inner husk in your fingers. The inner bean, of course, is what you keep, and the inner husk gets thrown away at this point or it goes into the compost heap.
So that's even more stuff that you discard, and we are back to efficiency. About a third of the crop that I got that first year produced a ton of greenery, which reduced to four cups of the beans, which reduced to about two cups of the inner beans, after the double podding. We'll come back to efficiency later.
The inner beans are a rather startling bright green after the rather dull colored beans that you have harvested out of pods. And, even at that point, and even with nothing else done to them, they're rather tasty just by themselves. But, of course, there are all kinds of things that you can do with the beans at this point.
You can use them as you would any other kind of bean. You can heat them up with a sauce. You can put them into any recipe as a replacement for protein, or carbohydrates. In a quick search Number Two Daughter, who is an absolutely fantastic cook, found about forty different recipes of all kinds of ways to prepare broad beans: in quiches, and risottos, and, what really tickled my fancy, some kind of bean and bacon dish.
But what we did was mash them. This turns them into a sort of guacamole, which I immediately dubbed bean-o-nomole. Number Two Daughter added some avocado as a kind of a binder, because the beans don't hold together particularly well. She also added some lemon juice, grated onion, and grated Parmesan. Of course as with anything that she does it was delicious. And I imagine rather nutritious as well, served on toast or crackers. Or as a dip in any other way. Probably as a vegetable dip of some kind it would be quite nutritious indeed.
One other thing about broad beans. They actually improve the soil they grow in, rather than depleting it. It's a good idea to grow broad beans, if you have some spare ground that you don't know what to do with, even if you don't intend to harvest the beans. Broad beans, like other legume crops, support mycorrhizal bacteria in the soil, and increase the nitrogen content. Yet more provision.
Why am I gardening? (No, stick with me; this isn't changing the topic; I'll tie all this together eventually.) That first year I grew five gardens. As my baby brother says, Mom taught us to hate gardening. And it seems to be emotionally dangerous. (At least, there were several emotionally dangerous events tied to the gardening for me.) And yet I needed to do it. And I don't understand that need. (The grief counsellors all say I don't *need* to understand it, but then they are all intuitive, and I'm a guy, and I'm instrumental, and I'm cognitive, and I need to understand.) (Which is also going to tie in.) I've had some minor successes. But more failures. (Although, as I say, even though it's hard to understand why I'm gardening, it's easy to figure out why I'm doing five gardens. I'm a security meven, and taught business continuity for twenty years. Redundant backup.)
And then I had several major gardening failures.
But maybe the reason that I so desperately needed to garden, is that God was teaching me patience. I *can* be patient. With things I understand. But God seems to be teaching me to be more patient with things I don't understand (which is very hard for me). I don't know why I need to learn patience. After all, I don't have much more time to be patient *with*. (And I wouldn't think I would need to be particularly patient in eternity: that seems kind of a contradiction in terms.) But I guess I have to trust. And have faith.
Faith from the Garden of Patience?
Patience from the Garden of Faith?
(Is there a difference?)
The first time I attended one particular church, a lot of the liturgy really hit close to home. Including the "confession" (of guilt, not faith). That first Sunday it spoke of not having enough faith in God, and doubting. So, maybe my impatience is doubt, and a failure of faith. And, given what I have seen in terms of long term developments in my life, which initially seemed to be failures, I should trust God more in terms of things I do not currently understand. I don't need to understand. I just need to have faith that all things work together for good.
The broad beans did pretty well in one garden, and at least showed in three more, which, since they were Gloria's favourite, seems a kind of grace. And some of the stuff that I thought had completely failed actually started to sprout and grow. So maybe the gardens are working to prove to me that just because it doesn't look like it's working out at first, doesn't mean God can't make it work in the end ...
And back to eficiency.
It's interesting to look at the Jewish laws, given by God, and note the wisdom; the worldly wisdom; that is applicable to, or from, then. The dietary laws, for example, frequently forbid eating certain types of animals that are, particularly for those in such a climate, in danger of infection, spoilage, or other dangers.
There are other factors where God's law seems to just rely upon what might be termed worldly wisdom. For a time, about forty years ago, I examined some of the laws and instructions from God, in the Bible, in terms of business practices. For example, about every twenty years the business community seems to rediscover the importance of paying attention to your people. Pay attention to your employees, and their needs, pay attention to your customers. In business terms this improves the bottom line. It is a general injunction that businesses seem to forget and then rediscover on a regular basis. In the 1960s it was theory X and theory Y. Around 1980 there was the book, "In Search of Excellence." Around 2000, there was the book, "The Human Equation." All of them said the same thing: pay attention to your people, and it will help your bottom line. And isn't this the second commandment: love your neighbor?
But then there was one thing that puzzled me. God did not seem to be interested in efficiency. There are specific laws that seem to be positively anti-efficiency. For example, the Jews were commanded not to glean right to the edge of the field. They were told not to go over the field the second time and pick up stalks of grain that they had missed the first time. Now, granted, you can make the case that this was to help the widows and orphans, and widows and orphans in the Bible tends to be shorthand for those with less than we have. So, in a sense, this can be seen as simply some kind of social program on an informal basis. But there are other passages in Scripture that can't be related to this kind of informal social support, but do seem to imply that God is not interested in efficiency.
For forty years I found this very puzzling. We, after all, are always interested in efficiency. Business is interested in efficiency. Capitalism is supremely interested in efficiency. So why is it that God is not?
And then, along came the pandemic, and it all became blindingly clear. The relentless pursuit of efficiency, above all, at all costs, renders a business more brittle. Systems that are efficient are also less resilient. There is no margin. There is no provision for error. If something goes wrong, it all comes crashing down. And God seems to have known that we would be blindly following efficiency, and get ourselves into trouble by so doing. Once again, God was trying to teach us a lesson that it took us a long time to learn.
And broad beans are one of the teaching tools about efficiency. Broad beans provide for us. God provides for us. In very many ways. But, if we try to push it, we are going to be frustrated.
I do have to be careful with regard to broad beans and efficiency. Someone has found a swath of land on the prairies that is particularly suited to growing broad beans. And they've found a new way to process the beans--one that is much more efficient. And, since this person is a Christian, he is planning on using the profits from the venture to fund church work and Christian missions of various types. So efficiency is not necessarily evil. It's just not the ultimate good.
Sermons: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/09/sermons.html
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