Last summer, I received a vegetable box with fresh produce from Dutch farmers for a couple of weeks. The fun, and sometimes frustrating, part about this box is, that you don’t have a say in what fruits and vegetables you get, so more than once, I got something I had never cooked with before. Among them were cactus figs, parsnips, and broad beans. It’s a good thing I like experimenting with unfamiliar ingredients, but they usually sit around for a while before I actually use them. Sometimes right up to the moment I nearly have to throw them out. But since I’m determined to waste as little food as possible, I eventually have come up with something. And I usually manage to do this, except for the one time I received two kilos of oranges instead of just two.

The broad beans had been lying around in my fridge for some time because I’m not a huge fan of beans. But I wouldn’t let them rot, so I turned them into a fresh sandwich spread perfect for summer. At the time I had fresh broad beans in the pod, but the recipe works equally as well with frozen ones.