For Dinner Tonight:

Bulgar with Broad Beans & Red Onions

Beefburgers

Strawberries & Homemade Vanilla Ice-Cream

I would like to be able to say that the beefburgers were made of organic and humanely raised beef or that they at least were from our local butchers and lovingly handmade by him (if not by me). I can't. The beefburgers were from our local freezer shop and supposedly from the kitchen of 'Aunt Bessie'. Call me cynical, but somehow I don't think she is a real person. They had the advantage of being a cheap buy at a hard time and they have lain forgotten in our freezer for a while. They aren't bad but generated so much fat in the frying pan that I wondered if there would be any burgers left by the time they were cooked.

We did better with the bulgar wheat. I added it to a mixture of red onions, garlic and our own broad beans from the freezer and cooked it in the pan with some vegetable stock. I have been musing on the broad beans. Does anyone else out there grow them? I think they must surely qualify as a luxury food in the sense that they require so much preparation (podding and then skinning the beans themselves unless they are really tiny) and produce so much inedible waste (pods and skins) for such a few delicious mouthfuls. I wondered whether it was really worth us growing them but Rob reassured me that the variety we grow, because it is grown over winter, doesn't take up space from other more 'useful' crops. Plus, broad beans with their nitrogen fixing root nodules are great for the soil quality and any waste is compostable. Hurrah! Isaac enjoys helping me prepare them too: