I love the misleading simplicity of fava bean recipes: Peel beans. Parboil for 1 minute. Rinse in cold water and slip beans from outer shell.

As if.

In reality, it took about 45 minutes to finally tease out a few tablespoons of glossy beans. They’re the vegetable equivalent of Russian dolls, if the dolls took months of sun and rain and then dropping them into a pot of boiling water to open.

Regular beans and strawberries and tomatoes all offer themselves up naked in the garden. But not favas. Their goodness is buried deep inside a foamy pod, and then inside a tough shell.

Pests stay far away. But not me. After shelling, I stewed these up with a little rosemary, garlic, olive oil. There wasn’t enough for a proper side dish, so I whirled it up in a food processor and dropped dollops on top of fish that my brother-in-law and sister made.

It's a crazy proposition, and surely wouldn't add up under the sensible scrutiny of a return-on-investment spreadsheet. But it was worth it. Because yesterday getting dinner ready, gratitude smelled like sun-warm vines in the garden and dirt caked to new leeks.