Recipe Review - Yotam Ottolenghi's Fava Bean Paella

Yotam Ottolenghi is best known for his food columns in the UK and his amazingly delicious eateries that reflect the creative and innovative food he creates. What I love the most about his food is the simplicity of the recipes. There are a few 'odd' ingredients here and there, but I have decidedly made these oddities staples in my pantry.  

It was this review done by NPR that originally got my mother interested in his work. The vegetarian cookbook "Plenty" focuses on good meals that just happen to be meatless. There are no weird substitutions for meat, or trying to create a meatless version of some other dish, it's simply great meat-free food.

I have cooked a few of the recipes, but was waiting until the right moment to make the vegetarian paella. I wanted to try it with my mother first, since she's the Spanish teacher, and therefore my paella resource. We made a Sunday afternoon out of finding fava beans (turns out we can only get dried or canned ones), as well as the oddities of no plum tomatoes in JULY at both of our local Wholefoods locations.  

We changed the recipe a bit, using brown rice - which took quite a bit longer to cook down. Next time I will alter the recipe a bit to accomodate for the brown rice, and instead of continuting to use stock, I would change over to water in order to not have wasted too much veggie stock.

This recipe is DEFINITELY being used again this week! Thank you Yotam, I have yet to find even a slight alteration needed for your recipes (only when I change the regular aborrio rice to brown aborrio), I carry this book around making sure I am ready to buy the supplies to be inspired by your genius.

Below is our Fava Bean Paella with Olives, Tomatoes, Artichokes, Fava Beans, Parsley, Onion and Fennell. Yummm.