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Lima beans used to remind me of a line in a Josh Ritter song: “I’m trying hard to love you / You don’t make it easy, babe.”

You know what I mean, right? That wan, wrinkled skin; that wet-sawdust texture; that hospital-cafeteria smell…those are the lima beans I recall picking out of the “frozen mixed vegetables” of my youth. (Which worked out just fine, since my vegetable-averse father actually likes lima beans. And brussels sprouts. Go figure.) Judging from this “Why are lima beans so universally hated?” thread on Chowhound, I’m not alone. And yet we know we’re supposed to like them because of all the fiber, protein and other nutritious stuff lurking within.

Fresh lima beans at a farmers market, courtesy of Flickr user Ed Yourdon

Fresh lima beans, however, have me singing a different tune. I found myself facing a pint of them for the first time a few weeks ago, thanks to our CSA share. After wresting the beans from their pods, I boiled them in just enough vegetable broth to cover for about 10 minutes, then hesitantly speared one for a taste test. It was tender without being mushy—almost velvety—with a lightly nutty flavor. Not bad at all!

They’ll be out of season soon, but if you’re fortunate enough to find some fresh lima beans, also called butter beans, here are a few ideas about how to cook them. (And if you happen to like frozen lima beans, I envy you, since they’re available year-round and could be used in any of these recipes, too).

1. Succotash. Recipes like this succotash of fresh corn, lima beans, tomatoes and onions are a good way to use up end-of-the-season vegetables. I like to add a hot pepper, and this recipe throws in zucchini and fingerling potatoes, too.

2. Hummus with herbs. The Gourmet recipe I tried actually called for frozen lima beans, but I used fresh ones boiled in vegetable broth. I also subbed fresh chives for parsley, sauteed the onions and garlic separately, and used some of the cooking broth in place of water. I wasn’t expecting it to be as good as chickpea-based homemade hummus, but it was better! We gobbled it down with toasted pita wedges, and made it again the next week.

3. Soup. Most recipes call for dried lima beans, which I’ve never tried, but suspect I might like more than frozen. From simple vegetarian butter bean soup to heartier versions involving ham hocks, chard and barley, there are plenty of options online.

4. Roasted. I’m eager to try this Mayan method, which calls for skillet-roasting the lima beans with sesame oil and ground pumpkin seeds. Oven-roasted lima beans seasoned with lime juice and cayenne pepper sound good, too.

5. Bacon and eggs with lima beans. I know, it’s a bit odd—but Chez Pim calls this the breakfast of champions, and she’s got awfully good taste. Besides, bacon has a way of making even the yuckiest vegetables taste divine.

After almost three years of working right down the street, I finally made time to explore the U.S. Botanic Garden on a recent lunch break. I expected mostly flowers, but found a food nerd’s Eden: So many of my favorite edibles, in their purest forms! So many tidbits of culinary history and science! So many spices to sniff!

Cacao tree at U.S. Botanic Garden, courtesy of Flickr user beatifulcataya

Their current exhibit (through October 11), called “Thrive! From the Ground Up,” is all about the plants that humans rely on for sustenance and health as well as flavor and beauty. Along the terrace outside the conservatory, there’s an herb garden with everything from anise to zaatar, and an envy-inducing “kitchen garden” with eggplants, peppers, tomatoes, kohlrabi, chard and more, including many heirloom varieties. There’s even a “beverage garden,” featuring plants whose fruit can be squeezed, steeped, fermented or distilled into drinks.

Inside, a fun exhibit called Spuds Unearthed, created in collaboration with the Potato Museum, pays homage to the potato’s role in cultures around the world. That exhibit also ends soon, but you can see it anytime in this video about potato history on our site.

And as if all that’s not enough, the garden often hosts lectures and demonstrations, many of them food-related; check out the events calendar for information on upcoming programs about spices, potatoes and more. Yesterday, the featured demonstration was about cooking—or rather, not cooking—with cacao. A sign for the event promised “Raw Cacao Bliss: Free!” Well, how could you resist that?

I stepped inside the classroom in the garden’s conservatory, where A. Thu Hoang, a Bethesda-based raw food chef and culinary instructor, was measuring chopped dates (1 cup), walnuts (3 cups), raw cacao powder (2/3 cup), vanilla (1 tsp) and sea salt (1/4 tsp) into a food processor to create a “10-minute chocolate cake.”

Raw cacao powder has more antioxidants than typical cocoa powder, which has usually been heated and chemically altered, Hoang said, and at least one study I’ve read confirms this idea. Raw cacao powder is available at most health-food stores, though it costs about twice as much as the processed stuff.

Although the end result wasn’t exactly what I would call cake—more like a dense, moist, sticky paste patted by hand into a cake shape—it was surprisingly tasty, and a thick coating of frosting topped with fresh raspberries made up for its aesthetic flaws.

My favorite part was the frosting, which she made by blending more raw cacao (1/3 cup) and dates (1/3 cup) with agave syrup (1/4 cup) and avocado (1/2 cup). Yes, avocado! I was skeptical, but its creamy texture turned out to be the perfect substitute for butter, and its taste was very subtle beneath the dominant chocolate flavor. It looked a lot like this—see? Would you guess there was avocado in there?

There were about 20 people in the audience, and many of them seemed to be new to the concept of raw food or even health food in general, which resulted in some funny moments. One woman asked about substituting “toasted pecans” for walnuts in the cake, then stopped to berate herself mid-sentence: “What am I saying? Then they wouldn’t be raw! This is about raw foods! I’m so sorry!”

I could relate; although I’ve heard of raw-food diets, it remains a fairly foreign concept to me. After the demonstration, I asked Hoang how long she’d been following such a diet, and why. She got into it about three years ago and doesn’t follow a 100-percent raw diet all the time, she said, but has noticed that even a 70-percent raw diet has given her much more energy (“you don’t even want caffeine anymore, honestly!”) and made her skin more supple (“after all, fruits and vegetables are full of water, and our bodies are mostly water”).

I was impressed and intrigued, and the idea has special appeal when you’re standing in the Botanic Garden, surrounded by couldn’t-be-more-raw bananas, cacao, vanilla and other ingredients. For about 10 minutes, I thought maybe I could “go raw.” But Mitsitam cafe was on my way back to the office, and they were serving hot pumpkin soup….

Irish moss, an acquired taste. Image courtesy of Flickr user Airstream Life

Today’s post is by Smithsonian staff writer Abigail Tucker.

On my recent trip to Ireland—where I discovered “real” Irish soda bread—I expected to encounter potatoes aplenty, and I wasn’t disappointed.

Traditional champ (or mashed) potatoes and chips (fries) were offered alongside more cosmopolitan spuds like Dauphinoise potatoes, basil-oil potatoes and potato curry spring rolls. At a folk life museum not far from my great-grandmother’s hometown, we saw a dipper (a stick for poking holes in the soil during potato planting) and a sciob (a basket for draining potatoes.) In the courtyard outside stood the local village’s black metal Famine Pot, used to serve soup to the starving in the 1840s, when the potatoes disappeared.

Yet potatoes were never all that old-time residents ate, I learned from Colm Melly, husband of my grandmother’s cousin Sadie and a resident of County Donegal on the northwest coast. In his memoir, “Brighter Days in Donegal,” about growing up in this rural corner of the country before World War II, he explains that local children were skilled at snaring rabbits, hooking sand eels, scouting for beehives and hazelnuts and gathering cockles. A pet piglet was never long for this world. (Grieved children eventually recovered enough to play football with the animal’s dried bladder, however.)

One local delicacy in particular caught my attention: Irish moss, the seaweed formally known as Chondrus crispus, which yields the extract carrageenan.

“When the salt water receded, we collected tufts of wet moss and spread it out to dry on rocks above the high water mark,” Colm’s memoir explains. It produced a medicinal jelly and functioned, he notes, as “an excellent aphrodisiac.” Housewives boiled the “moss” in milk and served it with cream, or as a pudding.

The shopkeeper who sold me a small bag of dried Irish moss promised that I wouldn’t even notice the seaweed taste—if I added enough whiskey, that is. Sadly, Amanda and I did not have whiskey on hand when we tested the milk concoction back here in D.C.

As directed, we rinsed the crunchy purple tufts to eliminate the “small sea shells, stones or crustaceans” that might be lurking within, then soaked them for 20 minutes in cold water. After the greenish fronds softened and unfurled, we dropped the seaweed in a warm pot of 2-percent milk flavored with honey, cinnamon and black pepper.

We let it simmer for a bit longer than the recommended five minutes—neither of us was especially eager to drink it—but while somewhat gluey, the liquid tasted pleasingly sweet, with a maritime tang. It eventually cooled into something more like pudding, which Amanda bravely sampled and declared the equal of any tapioca. (She also had the revolutionary idea of caramelizing the top, a la crème brulee, in a subsequent experiment that may or may not actually take place.)

There are plenty of edgier recipes out there; I saw one for Irish moss lasagna and another for Irish moss salad with apples and mayonnaise. While it smells slightly funky, the seaweed is chock-full of nutrition. For instance, the quarter-pound bag I bought boasted some 3,000 milligrams of potassium (a banana has only about 450 mg).

Still doesn’t sound like something you’d be willing to try? Surprise! You probably already have: carageenan extract is commonly used as a gelling agent in dairy products and toothpaste.

Chocolate bars, courtesy of Flickr user dcosand

Now that we’ve been schooled on college food, it’s time to graduate to a new Inviting Writing series. This month the topic is something on the minds of most American children this time of year, and anyone else who passes the seasonal displays in the supermarket: candy.

Send us your personal essays about trick-or-treating or other sweet memories. The only rules are that the story you tell must be true, and it must be in some way inspired by this month’s theme. Please keep your essay under 1,000 words, and send it to FoodandThink@gmail.com with “Inviting Writing: Candy” in the subject line. Remember to include your full name and a biographical detail or two (your city and/or profession; a link to your own blog if you’d like that included).

I’ll start. For more inspiration, see previous entries on the themes of manners, picnics, fear, road trips and college food.

Chocolate Terror
By Lisa Bramen

Candy and fear have always been intertwined in my memory. My earliest trick-or-treating outings were haunted by the 1970s hysteria over razor blades hidden in apples. I always figured that this was an urban legend started by clever kids hoping to discourage the do-gooders who gave out healthy alternatives to candy, but according to the myth-busting site Snopes.com, there really have been a number of cases of apple and candy tampering since the 1960s—although many were probably hoaxes. In any case, the fear of sabotage led parents to lay out trick-or-treating ground rules: anything homemade or not in a wrapper got tossed, and—the torture!—nothing could be eaten until it was brought home and inspected.

But my most traumatic candy experience wasn’t on Halloween. It was selling chocolate bars as a Camp Fire Girl.

Camp Fire Girls (now Camp Fire USA) is a club started in 1910 to give girls an experience similar to Boy Scouts; I joined my local troop in around 3rd or 4th grade. According to the Camp Fire USA Web site, wilderness outings are an important part of the program. But instead of walks in the woods or roasting marshmallows over a campfire, the only outings I recall my troop making were to the regional gatherings at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Los Angeles. Even worse than the morbid venue, the Whitman’s Sampler chocolates we were given as a special treat appeared to be as old as some of the headstones—and of a similar texture.

Renting out a cemetery isn’t cheap, I suppose, so another part of Camp Fire Girls was raising money through the annual chocolate bar drive. This was problematic for me in a couple of ways. First of all, unlike the ossified bonbons in the Whitman’s Samplers, the chocolate bars we were entrusted with selling were delicious. Giving an 8-year-old sugar fiend a box of candy she is not allowed to eat is like asking a drug addict to guard a pharmacy. As anyone who’s watched The Wire knows, the best dealers don’t touch their own product. I’m pretty sure I used up all my allowance money eating through my inventory.

I was already a poster child for the dental perils of sugar; the earliest consequence of my addiction (apple juice was my gateway drug) was that my two top front baby teeth rotted when I was a toddler and had to be capped in stainless steel. Who knows—maybe a future rapper saw my blingy smile one day, inspiring the grill trend of later decades?

An even bigger challenge than resisting temptation was door to door sales. I was a shy child, and I didn’t know most of our neighbors beyond the ones next door. I avoided it as long as I could—my parents brought boxes of bars to work to guilt their colleagues into buying, and group ambushes, when my fellow troop members and I stood outside the supermarket hassling potential customers, allowed me to stay in the background and let the more outgoing girls do the work.

But the day finally came when I would have to knock on my neighbors’ doors. I dutifully donned my official blue felt vest and white blouse, and set out on my Willy Lomanesque quest. The first few doors weren’t too bad. I made a sale or two, and even those neighbors who turned me down did so nicely. My confidence grew.

Then came the Tudor-style house with the turret entry near the end of the block. I knocked on the heavy wooden door with the black wrought-iron knocker. Someone opened a small window in the door and peered at me through an iron grate. I couldn’t see more than her eyes, but I could tell from the way she screeched, “what do you want?” that she was very old and not very happy to see me. I wanted to turn around and run back to my mother, who was waiting for me at the bottom of the driveway, but I stammered through my sales pitch anyway. The crone, apparently judging me some kind of third-grade con artist, shouted: “You people were just here last week. How do I know you’re even a Camp Fire Girl?”

I ran down the driveway, tears forming in my eyes, and told my mother what had happened. I’m a little surprised that she didn’t head back up the driveway and give the woman a piece of her mind for treating a little girl that way, but I guess she knew what I have since come to realize: She was probably just a confused old woman who was as scared of the people on the other side of the door as I was.

My mother consoled me and allowed me to cut my sales trip short. I probably even got a chocolate bar out of it.

A side dish of Utica greens, courtesy of Flickr user philosophygeek

Utica. The very name sets my mouth to watering. What? You don’t think of the Central New York rust-belt city as a center of culinary excellence? Well, neither did I until recently. In fact, the entire basis for my Pavlovian response is a single dish—Utica-style greens—that I have eaten only at a Lake Placid restaurant three hours’ drive north of Utica.

I have heard that Utica, which used to have a booming textiles industry, has a great selection of ethnic restaurants thanks to its diverse immigrant population. But on my only visit to the city, about a year ago, I completely missed out.

I accompanied Niki, one of my fellow editors at the regional Adirondack magazine where I work, on a road trip there to pick up some ice cream (packed in dry ice) we were going to write about. We had some other stops to make on the way, and we timed it so we would be in Utica around lunchtime. My stomach was growling by the time we reached city limits, but we figured we’d quickly stop to pick up our ice cream and then head off in search of lunch.

When we arrived at the little shipping store on a deserted side street in the industrial part of town where we were supposed to retrieve our cargo, though, the slightly creepy-seeming proprietor told us it wasn’t there. He made a call and, after convincing Niki and I that we would get lost if he tried to send us to the location of our package, told us to wait there while he went to get it. This was fine, except that he decided to lock us inside (to protect what, I don’t know, for the only items on view were some tacky tchotchkes). Maybe it was our overly active imaginations, or hunger—or maybe the picture of a scantily clad woman hanging in the bathroom—but the idea of being locked in the store made us a little nervous, a feeling that only escalated as the minutes dragged out to an hour or more. The only food in sight was a little dish of old hard candies on the counter. Desperate, I ate one. By the time the guy finally returned with our ice cream and we were able to leave, we were too hungry to go driving around in search of a good meal. We stopped at the first place we saw—a Little Caesar’s pizza—and scarfed down a greasy slice. So much for the culinary delights of Utica.

A few months ago, though, I finally discovered the city’s signature dish, though not on its home turf. It appears on the menu at the relatively new and oddly named Liquids & Solids at the Handlebar (the Handlebar was a previous establishment on the premises) in Lake Placid, where it’s made with Swiss chard mixed with garlic, cherry peppers, flakes of smoked trout and rock shrimp and topped with a gratin of bread crumbs and Parmesan cheese. I love vegetables even relatively unadorned, but this dish has enough flavor—spicy, salty, smoky—to satisfy greens-haters, too.

It turns out this version is a twist on the regional Utica favorite, where it probably originated with Italian immigrants. Although there are many variations, the most common ingredients are escarole (chard or other greens also work), prosciutto (adding the smokiness and salt), garlic, chicken broth and hot peppers—a recipe at The Cookbook Project appears to be a standard.  The dish is so popular in the city that the annual Utica Arts and Music Festival (which I apparently just missed last weekend) includes a Greens Fest, with a tent serving versions from area restaurants.

I’ll be back, Utica.