Feast Day of St. Joseph

I love this image of St. Joseph. You can see the love in this man's eyes for his foster son. It reminds me of TFOLT with our children. Saint Joseph is one of my favorite Saints. I have come to love St. Joseph through out the years.I have asked him to intercede on my behalf to save my marriage. I am sure the man understands all too well the difficulties of a troubled marriage. He is the Patron Saint of Retrouvaille. I am amazed at Josephs strength and grace when he answered God's call. He might not have had to go raise an army or be burned at the stake, but what he asked to do took amazing courage and humility. 

This year, we are starting a new family tradition. We are going to celebrate St. Joseph's Feast Day with all the tradition, pompt and circumstance that can be mustered on Tuesday during Lent. We will be decked out and red and busting out some new recipes and tring some food we have never had. Fava will be on the menu. I understand in medieval times fava was horse food.  Fava is the traditional bean used to celebrate St. Joseph's feast day. Who knew? I sure did not. 

Here is the recipe: for Bessara:

Prep Time: 15 minutes

Cook Time: 1 hour, 15 minutes
Total Time: 1 hour, 30 minutes
Yield: Serves 4 to 6 as side dish.
Ingredients:

• 1 1/2 cups (about 8 oz. or 200 g) dried fava beans
• 2 cloves garlic
• 1/3 cup olive oil
• 1/4 cup lemon juice
• 2 tablespoons (or more) reserved cooking liquid
• 1 1/2 teaspoons salt
• 1 teaspoon ground cumin
• 1/2 teaspoon sweet paprika
• 1/2 teaspoon hot paprika or cayenne pepper
• ----------------------------------------------------------
• additional cumin, paprika and olive oil, for garnish
• chopped parsley or cilantro, for garnish (optional)

Preparation: Soak the dried fava beans overnight in a large bowlful of water. The next day, drain the beans and peel them if they weren't already skinned and split.


Place the peeled fava beans in a pot and cover with a generous amount of water. Bring to a boil over high heat, then reduce the heat to medium or medium-high, and simmer the beans until tender, one hour or longer.

Drain the beans, reserving the liquid.

Transfer the beans to a food processor, and add the garlic, olive oil, lemon juice, 2 tablespoons of the reserved liquid, and spices. Process on high speed until smooth, adding additional liquid if necessary to thin the bessara. It should be thin enough to pour or spread out on a plate. Taste the bessara, and adjust the seasoning if desired.


Reheat the bessara and serve warm. Garnish with any of the following: ground cumin, paprika, hot paprika, olive oil, and chopped parsley.

I have read that canned or frozen fava beans work well with this recipe. It is time to experiment and see if I can come up with a gluten free pita bread that taste good. I will let you know how it goes. 

A little Saint Joseph humor:

You see, heaven is a large walled compound, with gates of pearl at the entrance, where St. Peter takes his post with his keys. When the newly departed arrive at those pearly gates, St. Peter looks them up in his book, and either lets them in, or sends them down the road.

So one day it is St. Pete’s day off, and he is wandering about, and he sees some folks that he is pretty sure he sent down the road — but there they are inside heaven. He doesn’t think too much of it, though. He’s not paying all that close attention to faces, and after all they do tend to all run together anyway. But he does spend the next days paying closer attention to exactly who is being let in and who is being sent down the road. And on his next day off, he sees 3 different people who were definitely sent along their way.

St. Pete decides to do some investigating. He marches out the pearly gates and down the road. Around the corner, down a little ways, around another corner, where he is brought up utterly dumbfounded by the sight. There is St. Joseph, and he is boosting people over the wall! St. Pete marches over to St. Joseph and starts haranguing him. He says that this is utterly against the rules, absolutely unacceptable, and that therewill be consequences! St. Joseph doesn’t say anything. Finally St. Pete finishes up his harangue by telling St. Joseph that he will not mention this little incident to anyone as long as St. Joseph makes sure that it never happens again.

Thinking that he has dealt with this outrage very well, St. Pete then spins on his heel, marches back up around the two corners and down the road and through the pearly gates. He resumes his job, but is still being careful to remember faces and who got let in and who got sent down the road. On his next day off, again, there are the Wrong People in heaven!

So again St. Pete marches out in high dudgeon; again he comes around the corner; again St. Joseph is boosting people over the wall. This time Pete is utterly apoplectic. He rages on and on about how unacceptable, wrong, not be tolerated, Pete is going to report this straight to God, terrible things will happen, maybe even Joe will get thrown out of heaven. Around this time Pete needs to pause for a second to take a breath. At which point St. Joseph, shrugging, says, “Hey, I go—I take the wife and kid with me.”