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i followed hugh's antics with glee across his journey of food discovery and i was very happy when he turned up his website into a vertable diet of all things good.
i signed up became a member and read his monthly emails with glee. it seemed to go a bit downhill from there with an awful lot of space being directed to his new ventures of days for this days for that etc. i became a little boered with the packaging and longed for the content once again, another site i frequent has a very good content is king option which bypasses all of the adverts in favour of the stories and news content, if only Hugh could do the same...
i do still read the emails and visit the site and every now and then a very good idea pops up! so from hugh's father came the inspiration of the text below, frozen broad beans - read on

The success of the reincarnated pea and broad bean does, however, depend on the freezing technique. The most important thing to remember is that the aim is principally to fix the sugars. The best way to do this is to blanch the peas or beans briefly before freezing – and as soon as possible after picking. Aim to pick, pod, blanch and drop in the freezer all within an hour – two at the most. Blanching simply means immersing the peas or beans in rapidly boiling water for 30 seconds, or absolutely no more than a minute. Then drain them, refresh quickly in ice-cold water, toss in a tea towel to dry, and bag up for the freezer. Sucking the air out of the bag – either with your own lungs or, if you’re freezing a very big harvest, with the aid of a vac-packing machine – helps to remove moist air that will otherwise form ice crystals. Such crystals are not critically damaging but they are worth minimising, as they will scar the peas or beans with a mild freezer burn.

When it comes to reincarnation, bring a pan of lightly salted water to a full rolling boil. Peel off the bag from the still-frozen peas and add them to the pan. Once the water has come back to the boil, a scant minute is all the peas or beans will need – from which you may correctly deduce that I would never cook fresh young garden peas or broad beans for longer than two minutes. You could make that four for bigger, mealier peas and five for larger, later broad beans – but no more.Get this right and you will have something that is beaten only – and fractionally at that – by the taste of the very same, just-picked peas a few minutes before they went in the freezer. It’s as well not to fool oneself about this. It is, I’m afraid, out of a quite misguided sense of virtue – to thank them, if you like, for at least trying – that I sometimes find myself gathering up from a greengrocer’s box the withered shells of some peas in the pod that have been languishing there for days. I know in my heart of hearts that, when it comes to taste, Bird’s Eye will have them licked every time. Turning our attention from vegetables to fruit for a moment, which is something we certainly shouldn’t forget to do this month, we may apply the freezing question again. Which of July’s abundant soft fruits and berries are worth freezing?If you wish to reincarnate the fruit, like the pea or the broad bean, as some passable vestige of its former self, then only one type of summer fruit passes the test: the raspberry, and its related cluster-berry types, the tayberry and loganberry. Freeze these as individuals on trays. Then, when they are frozen as solid as stones, pack them loose in Tupperware boxes. Spread them out in an even, single layer to defrost and they’ll be passably usable as fresh fruit.It is worth amending the question, though, to broaden the catchment: which summer fruits are worth freezing as purées or, better still, sorbets and ice-creams? The answer is, all that you can possibly lay your hands on.

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