A Rare Bean

So tonight was the big night, the night that I would prepare the mystery vegetable that I have been alluding to all week. So here it is . . .



Hmm. Don't recognize that? How about this . . .



Still nothing? Well, those are garbanzo beans (or chickpeas depending on your preferred nomenclature). I've never actually seen them fresh before and perhaps it has something to do with the fact that each pea is sealed in a little pod and must be removed individually. It was kind of a pain and yielded a very small amount of chickpeas after an a bit of labor this morning before heading off to work. The main question I had was why they were green when any chickpea I've ever encountered is tan or beige in color.



I also made some fresh pasta this morning which I rolled out and cut this evening. I made a quick pasta with fiddlehead ferns, fresh garbanzo beans, bacon, olive oil, and a little butter. It used up the remaining bacon from last night's dinner and made a very tasty pasta. I was leery of using the fiddleheads at first but I was very glad I did in the end. I think I've really come around to fiddleheads in the last year. Previously I thought them to be overrated and bitter. Now I find them to be overrated and less bitter. My hope is that by next year I will find them to be overrated and tasty.



This wine cork took Jen ten minutes and me ten to fifteen minutes of work to remove. After I finally removed it from the bottle I was sweating and breathless. Luckily it was one of those rubber corks which I was able to pry out with my waiter's friend and a pair of pliers though I ended up breaking the pair of pliers.



The wine itself was pretty tasty. However, by my calculations for the amount of effort expended this should have been the best wine I've ever tasted. This was not the case. In the future I may avoid this particular bottle unless they change the packaging so that they replace the label with a $100 dollar bill.