Bean Salad with Hoisin Vinaigrette

This is my favorite bean salad. It's vegan, it's served at room temperature so it's great for a potluck, and it's pretty.

Bean Salad with Hoisin Vinaigrette

1/3 cup rice vinegar

2 tablespoons hoisin sauce

2 tablespoons water

2 teaspoons chopped fresh ginger

Make vinaigrette by processing these ingredients in blender or food processor until smooth. Set aside.

6 ounces green beans

Steam or boil green beans until lightly cooked.

1 tablespoon vegetable oil

1 tablespoon chopped garlic

1 red pepper, cut lengthwise in thin slivers

1 can garbanzos, drained and rinsed

2 teaspoons sesame oil

Heat oil and sauté garlic and pepper until pepper begins to soften, about 2 minutes. Add green beans, garbanzos, and sesame oil and toss and heat until well blended.

¼ cup thinly sliced green onion

Chopped cilantro

Remove from heat and add Hoisin Vinaigrette. Taste and add salt or soy sauce if necessary. Serve at room temperature, garnished with green onions and cilantro.

Pork Tenderloin with Sage and Mustard

I heard Michael Pollan on NPR today talking about his open letter to the next president. He eloquently summarized his ideas, notably that the unhealthiest foods (hydrogenated fats, high-fructose corn syrup) are the cheapest because they are subsidized by the government, and that we should be subsidizing broccoli instead! So we are going to have broccoli and tofu tonight.

Last night, however, we had a teeny pork tenderloin pan-fried with garlic, sage, and rosemary, and finished with a sauce of pan juices, Dijon mustard, and vermouth. With it we had baked butternut squash and Jack Bishop green beans, a preparation I can't seem to get enough of.

Homemade Pasta with Pesto and Green Beans

The pesto Lawson made over the weekend was so fresh and good and perfumey that I decided it deserved some homemade pasta. The combination of pesto, homemade pasta, and green beans is not untraditional (though I skipped the potatoes).

The pasta recipe (from both Marcella Hazan and Jack Bishop) was simple: 1 cup of flour and two eggs, mixed in a food processor and then kneaded by hand. I ended up adding a good bit more flour during the kneading and rolling, but stiff pasta dough is not a bad thing.

After reading Ms. Hazan's rant in More Classic Italian Cooking about how pasta machines are evil, I nonetheless pulled out Lawson's lovely old hand-cranked Atlas pasta machine and proceeded to make some fettucine. Here it is waiting to be cooked. The local eggs I used had vibrant, almost orange yolks, which made the raw pasta a lovely yellow.

We had it with the barest salad: red romaine, lemon juice, salt, olive oil, and pepper.

French Chili

This was reminiscent of the old chili my mother made with a pound of hamburger, a can of red kidney beans, and a can of tomato soup.

I browned some of the wonderful little French Bistro sausages you sent for Christmas, along with some onions and garlic. Then I added a can of cannelini beans, half a can of tomatoes, and a little water. I seasoned with salt, pepper, and fresh parsley and thyme and simmered for a half hour. It was a perfect casual winter supper. I served it with a green bean and tomato salad and garlic bread.

Double Beets

Here's another light meal for this season when I seem to spend a lot of time recovering from eating or drinking too much.

- Beets, roasted and tossed with olive oil, salt, and the juice of one tangerine
- Large green beans, steamed and tossed with olive oil, salt, and tarragon (as suggested by Jack Bishop)
- A tortilla española containing onions, potatoes, the beet stems and tops, and Parmesan cheese, served at room temperature. I was worried the stems would dye the potatoes and eggs a nasty pink, but it wasn't too bad. Maybe the potatoes were a little rosy.

I make this kind of meal a lot, but this time around it was well seasoned and came together especially well.

Planned Side Dishes

It's important to plan over a healthy breakfast.

Lawson and I are assigned the side dishes for his big family Thanksgiving again. We are going to be much less ambitious than in years past, so I am feeling pretty good about it all. Here's what we're making:

- Collards, traditional Southern style. This involves a ham hock and several hours of simmering with plenty of water.

- Green beans, traditional Southern style. This involves a smoked turkey neck and several hours of simmering with plenty of water. Are you getting all this?

- Spinach-rice. Because the turkey is smoked, it isn't stuffed, and every year Lawson pores over stuffing recipes and spends hours making it and nobody eats very much. His stuffing is good, but I don't think it's a stuffing-eating family. So we're going with rice and spinach this year.

- Macaroni and cheese, which I have noted in the past is the weirdest of the traditional Southern Thanksgiving foods. We will be using the absurd Macaroni and Cheese Supreme recipe of the illustrious David Wade, TV chef and object of my scholarly and acquisitional interest. I can't wait. The recipe includes 2 cups of sour cream. It will clog arteries from 8 yards away.

- Cranberry sauce. I adore the extremely tart raw cranberry-orange relish we make every year with the hand-cranked meat grinder, but I'm going to try plain cooked cranberry sauce this year to see how it goes over.

- I may make some gingerbread.

So, all in all, it should be pretty low key. The only bad part is that we have to procure all our groceries tonight, along with the rest of the city.

Early Fall Green Beans

We bought some green beans at a farm stand near Hendersonville, North Carolina, this weekend, and because it's September, they were not exactly young and delicate. So I cobbled together this recipe out of several things: my standard lemon-zest-and-olive oil recipe, Viana La Place's butter-and-basil recipe, and the wonderful wrinkled look of Chinese stir-fried green beans. It was great. Here is what to do with tough older green beans:

De-stem (or top and tail if they are yucky) one pound of green beans, and break them into 2" pieces.

Boil for 5-8 minutes or until al dente. Drain.

Heat 2-3 tablespoons butter in a big skillet. Toss beans in. Saute over medium low heat -- really, just let them sit quietly, barely cooking, absorbing the butter -- for about 20 minutes. It's sort of like a lidless braise. Add salt to taste. When beans are tender, add 1 teaspoon lemon zest and 1 tablespoon small or chiffonaded basil leaves. Toss again, turn off heat, and let sit at room temperature until serving.

Please note the highly literal photo, which contains green beans and autumnal gourds. (It also contains fried eggplant and a caprese salad.)

Recovery

We had commercial take-out pizza Saturday night, and it made me rededicate myself to cooking fresh, unsalty things. It was horrible. Rubbery cheese, doughy crust, and salt—help, I’m obsessing about this pizza! I’m going to have nightmares!

Now, on to the antidotes. Tonight we had a little fillet of fresh silver salmon from Alaska, caught by our neighbor on a fishing expedition. I prepped it with lemon juice, salt, and pepper, then spread on a mixture of sambal and brown sugar before broiling. With it we had a thoroughly baked sweet potato—soft, unctuous—and this wonderful green bean salad from the Jack Bishop cookbook.

Green Bean and Tomato Salad

Lightly cook enough fresh young green beans for 2 to 4 people. Drain and cool.

Then mix:

2 ripe tomatoes, cut in ½ inch dice
1 green onion, thinly sliced
Juice of ½ lemon
2 tablespoons olive oil
Salt and pepper
Black olives
Minced parsley
Chopped walnuts

Add green beans and top with
½ cup crumbled feta cheese

The night immediately following the pizza incident we had the vegetable curry pictured above, with a cucumber/green onion/rice vinegar salad and brown rice, followed by champagne grapes. We’re feeling better now.

Roasting Green Beans

When we visited David and Susan in Texas, they served a perfect dinner for weary travelers: grilled salmon, pink beans, cole slaw, and roasted green beans. I actually woke up in the middle of the night and wished that I had more of those green beans.

Susan says she roasts them at 425 degrees for 25 minutes. I did the same, with a little olive oil, salt, and pepper, but mine were not especially wonderful. I bet that's because she grew the beans herself and they had just been picked the same day.