There are lots of recipes out there for long cooked green beans – green beans that go against the current taste for crisp-tender, that are simmered for long enough to get tender and toothsome. Probably the first one I tried was Deborah Madison’s from Vegetarian Cooking For Everyone – she has you layer onions, the beans, and diced tomatoes in a deep skillet, seasoned with whole cumin seeds – and I think I have added dill. This is the book that always makes me laugh when I read the cover because it says, “the 1,400 recipes in this book are the ones I like to cook”. C’mon, Deborah, you know that none of us really has 1,400 – they’re all just variantions on a far fewer number of riffs. There’s this one from Bon Appetit, Turkish style, served with yogurt, but it’s still the beans, onions, tomatoes, cooked slowly together. And I’m sure I read something in one of the cooking mags recently, a paean to long-cooked vegetables – Saveur, maybe? Another Deb, Smitten Kitchen, has a good long cooked beans – Braised Romano Beans–
smitten kitchen beans
Now my beans looked nothing like Deb’s when they were raw – they were Romano beans, but I think they were the last of crop from my CSA farmer, and I think they might’ve been frosted. They had brown streaks, and some of them had to be tossed. I was trying really hard to get them into the pot and cooking – because I knew they’d look better cooked – before any of my eaters got home and saw them raw. I made them the totally standard way – onions in oil in the skillet, diced Roma tomatoes, the beans on top. Cover and cook. The only innovation was that rather than water or tomato juice, I poured in a good slug of apple cider. Which turned out to be genius – softened up those tough old beans and sweetened them, too. Not pretty, but they tasted good.
Romano beans braised with tomatoes & cider
The beans were part of a quite satisfying little dinner, actually. Maybe to soothe my hurt feelings because our AFS student wants to go live elsewhere, or maybe because my dad was on the faculty of University of Pittsburgh’s medical school, and we had interns and residents around the house all the time when I was a kid, or maybe just because I really like my neighbor, who asked me to do this because she couldn’t, we now have a UW Hospital Family Medicine resident living with us. Amanda, from Ecuador, will be with us for three weeks, and she arrived last night. So I made chicken breasts roasted with rosemary and garlic and olive oil, and rice cooked in homemade veggie broth with shredded greens, and the beans.
