Fava Beans: To Peel, or Not to Peel?

Once again, it's confession time. I love fava bean season so much that, at the first sign of the bundles of young green shoots on farmers' market tables in the spring, I get a little giddy thinking of them stir-fried with garlic and tossed with pasta and preserved lemon, or slathered with oil and roasted, served alongside a beautiful grilled, pasture-raised chicken thigh. Then there's the knowledge that in just a couple of weeks, it'll be time for the pods to start appearing, their strange, off-green, blobby exteriors revealing pale green kidney-shaped beans pillowed in a porous white cushion. My neighbor Bill loves his favas and grows more than enough to share. Lucky me! That's about when I remember that to prepare these little beany delights, I have to strip them out of their pods, boil them in a salty pot of water, then spend what seems like hours in the tedious task of popping them out of their skins to get a paltry—albeit decidedly delicious—pile of the bright green, shiny…