En todas las casas cuecen habas

Here you have some "habas" or "fave" or "feves" or fava beans. This Spanish saying, "in every house, they cook fava beans" loosely translates to "everyone has a skeleton in their closet". The idea is that fava beans were considered food for the poor and despite one's pretension of wealth, one still went home and ate fava beans, not steak. Now, I certainly don't mind a good steak every once in a while but fava beans are pretty good too. They are, however so work-intensive to prepare that they might these days imply you have servants in the kitchen! What you see here are fava beans that have been divested of their pods, then boiled for 3-4 minutes and then squeezed out of their tough skins. For 1 kilo (2.2 pounds) of whole fava beans with pods, I ended up with 3 cups of edible favas. Evidently there are fresher, younger fava beans that don't require that last step of squeezing since the outer skin is still tender. I haven't seen favas like that around here, though. Here is a lovely spring dish you can make for 4 people as a main dish.

Spaghettini with fresh favas, pancetta and sun-dried tomatoes

1 lb spaghettini
3 cups shelled, boiled, peeled favas
1/4 cup olive oil
1 small, yellow onion
1 clove garlic
4 ozs pancetta/bacon, diced
1/4 cup diced sun-dried tomatoes
shaved Parmesan to taste

Heat the olive oil in a wide frying pan, add the onion and brown; this takes several minutes. Once the onion is light brown, add the garlic and saute for 1 minute. Remove to a plate. Set a large pot of salted water to boil. In the same frying pan, now add the pancetta/bacon and fry over medium-low heat, about halfway through remove the accumulated bacon grease. Continue cooking until it is brown and thoroughly crispy. This will take several minutes. Remove to the plate. Once the water is boiling add the pasta and add the reserved onion, garlic and pancetta/bacon back to the frying pan along with the favas and the sun-dried tomatoes. Saute and warm the sauce while the pasta cooks. Once the pasta is just a bit harder than al dente, add 1/4 cup of the cooking water to the frying pan, drain the pasta and add it. In the pan, the pasta will cook to a perfect al dente and will absorb some of the flavors of the sauce. Once most of the water is absorbed, take the pan off the heat and serve immediately with Parmesan shavings on top.