Eat Your Veggies: Garlic Green Beans

While I appreciate bacon or ham in my veggies as much as the next person who grew up in the Deep South, I wanted to try a green bean recipe somewhere in between green beans heavily laden in pork product and just simply bland-ish boiled green beans. To be fair —  pork fat does rule… just not in all of my veggies all the time. I love the simplicity of the green bean recipe we found on Southern Living, and the fats involved are mostly of the ‘good’ variety: olive oil with some butter. Yeah, eat your heart out, Paula Deen.

The final product is definitely crisper than some of the other green bean recipes out there : A bonus, I think. The recipe is essentially:  Prep green beans, mince or press garlic, blanch beans in salted water, dunk beans in ice water to stop cooking process, saute green beans with olive oil/butter mix, garlic, and spices…et voilà! You’re done.

Here’s the expanded recipe with (more or less) step by step shots…

Garlic Green Beans
from Southern Living Magazine through myrecipes.com

Ingredients:

• 1 1/2 lbs tiny green beans (haricots verts), trimmed
• 1 TBSP butter
• 1 TBSP olive oil
• 3 garlic cloves, minced
• 1 teaspoon kosher salt
• 1 teaspoon freshly ground pepper

Instructions/Method Shots:

1) Cook green beans in boiling salted water to cover 3 minutes or until crisp-tender; drain. Plunge green beans into ice water to stop the cooking process, and drain.

Here are the green beans ready to boil…

Almost to full boil….

…and in the ice-water bath.

The blanched beans were then put in our colander to drain.

2) Melt butter with oil in a medium skillet over medium-high heat; add green beans, garlic, salt, and pepper, and sauté 4 to 5 minutes or until thoroughly heated.

Here’s the olive oil and butter in the closest pan we have to a wok:

I put the pressed garlic in first, cooking it a little before I added the beans and seasoning…

I then sauteed everything for about 5 minutes (more or less) until everything was well distributed and well heated. The finished product is the first picture you see at the beginning of this post…

This recipe also worked with the wide-ish green beans we got through the local Sunday Farmer’s Market… Here are the beans cut up in one of our larger bowls:

…And here’s the finished product with the wider beans.

The thing I goofed on the first time I made this recipe was not adjusting the seasonings to the amount (weight) of beans I had. No, Silly Random Hapa, wider beans aren’t going to make a pound more than a pound. I made sure to make the right tweaks for two pounds of green beans the second time around (finished product shot at the beginning of the post).