Feelin' the bean love

So, what do you do when you get a fabulously fresh batch of green beans from your CSA?

1. Stash the beans in the fridge till you can find a recipe for it
2. Be insanely magnanimous and give them to a friend
3. Skip around in circles all excited about them green beans
4. Pore feverishly through all those cookbooks trying to find a new recipe that'll showcase the beans
5. Do 3. and 4. - basically certifying that you're a minor nutcase! :)

Well, no points for guessing what I did. Kind of hard to keep skipping around in circles while flipping through those cookbooks, but I did it nevertheless! :)

I finally settled on a green beans and garlic recipe - not the traditional pan-asian one, but one with a bit more gravy - a bunch of chopped tomatoes thrown in, along with a batch of cannellini beans for more fiber goodness. A generous dash of white wine totally added a slurpy tingling aftertaste - much better than any vinaigrette could have.

Beans and Beans with Garlic and Tomatoes
Skip as you stir, makes it taste better :)

Servings: 4

12 oz cooked cannellini beans (I just used them drained and rinsed out of a can for this recipe)
1 T olive oil
1 onion - finely chopped
3-4 garlic cloves (crushed)
3-4 tomatoes - peeled and chopped
12-14 oz green beans - sliced diagonally into long chunks
1/2 cup of white wine (I used a chardonnay here)
2/3 cup water (or veggie stock)
1 T fresh parsley
salt
freshly ground black pepper

Heat the oil in a large frying pan and saute the onions and garlic for 3-4 minutes till soft.
Add the chopped tomatoes and continue cooking over low heat for another 3-4 minutes till they start softening.
Add the green beans, wine, water (or stock) and a little salt and stir well.
Cover and simmer for 5-6 minutes.
Stir in the cannellini beans and simmer covered for another 3-4 minutes.
Increase the heat to reduce the liquid and season with the black pepper.
Garnish with the parsley before serving.



Opinion?

The earthy cannellini beans and garlic added a yummy french twist to the green beans - I originally started making this as a side, but it turned out so good that it was the meal of the night, along with some crispy spiced flatbread.



More recipes with beans:

• Bengali Vegetable Medley
• An assortment of chilis
• Chole
• Green Beans and Butternut Squash Dal
• Fusilli and Green Bean Casserole
• Quinoa with green beans and asparagus

This goes to Kel from Green Olive Tree for WHB (Kalyn's brainchild) - thanks to both for organizing this!
And on a different note, if you haven't had a chance to check out Sig's blog yet, head over yonder to read about our insanely fun blog gathering last week. Thanks Sigster, for jumpstarting this!

Halibut meets grape leaves

This was one of those perfect seafood meals. It was also one of those "Damn! The camera is on the fritz!" meals! :)

While poking around for interesting fish recipes, I came across JenBlossom's post about halibut with lemon butter. Soon, I was trolling the Food&Wine recipe collection looking for other halibut recipes. This one about halibut roasted in grape leaves caught my eye. We haven't had grape leaves in a long while, and this recipe sounded really simple and quick. In one of those rare instances, we pretty much followed the recipe, except for using halibut fillets with the skin on - not a problem since it peeled off real easily once they were baked.

We really wanted to get all pieces of our meal ready at the same time, it truly sucks when an entree sits around getting cold while the sides are still being worked on! After a little juggling, we figured out how to create a packet of grape leaves, drizzle it with olive oil and chopped thyme and seasoning and wrap the halibut in it. Soon, 4 pretty pouches went into the oven :) In the meantime, we chopped up some yukon gold potatoes and sauteed those with vidalia onions - seasoning was a dash of cayenne, some cumin powder and rock salt. And this time, we seasoned it with a bunch of italian parsley instead of the usual cilantro. It worked really well!

The other side was an old favorite - fresh green beans sauteed in a soy sauce+rice vinegar+grapeseed oil+sesame seeds reduction. Tasty, like always!

Once the fish was out, we unwrapped the grape leaves and drizzled the lemon-mustard dressing over the halibut - it was so yummy, can't wait to try it on some veggies next time!

It was a fabulous meal, but the camera was out to lunch, so all we have is this one sad picture!


End result: Autumn was happy! Very happy! :)

Fusilli e Bean Casserole

Today felt like a non-desi comfort food day. Hmm ... mac'n'cheese? No, I was craving something more nutritious than that! :)

After poking around several cookbooks, I finally embarked on making a veggie-filled pasta bake. As the fusilli cooked, I started gathering the makings for the base. A bunch of green beans were on hand, a ripe'n'ready-to-burst tomato was waiting too. And maybe some olives?

Fusilli e Bean Casserole

3 cups fusilli - cooked al dente
1 large ripe vine tomato
1/3 lb green beans - parboiled
10 green olives
1/2 cup nonfat milk
2 T all purpose flour
1/3 cup light havarti cheese - grated
2-3 t chopped chives
1/2 cup of breadcrumbs (or) crumbled flatbread, which was all I had on hand
red pepper flakes
salt to taste

After pureeing the peeled tomato, I added the minced olives in. The next step was to make a nonfat white sauce by roasting the flour in a dry pan over heat and adding the milk, constantly stirring to avoid clumping. I figured chives might give the sauce a good flavor - especially since I was skipping onions and garlic this time! It only took about 2-3 minutes to get a sauce consistency - I mixed this into the tomato puree, added the pasta, beans and cheese. The last step was to toss the mixture with salt and red pepper flakes before pouring into a baking pan and sprinkling with the flatbread crumbs.

It only took 15 minutes of baking at 375 F to finish cooking the pasta goodness!

Quinoa and other great flavors

Peru is chockful of good things - Macchu Picchu, Cuzco, Nazca, pisco ... and quinoa! And tonight was time for a quinoa pilaf - simple, yet delectable.

After the usual ritual of rinsing the quinoa several times in cold water (the grains have a bitter coating called saponin that can often irritate the stomach lining and needs to be washed off), I cooked it in a pot of water with some salt and a few drops of olive oil. As I poked around trying to find some veggies to go with it, I found this jar of pickled asparagus. Hmm ... and a bag of frozen shelled edamame - sounds weird, but it tastes pretty good. Seems like I had the makings for a green pilaf!


The base was a bunch of chopped scallions and yellow wax beans sauteed with a spoon of olive oil and some garlic. I then threw in the asparagus spears bits and a couple of cups of boiled edamame. Once the quinoa was cooked, I tossed it with the veggies and threw in some of that fabulous Melinda's habanero sauce and a spoon of lemon-ginger juice. And garnished it with some toasted cashews.


Simple, yet delectable. Did I already say that? :)

Broiled Salmon in Citrus-Cilantro Pesto

We stumbled across an old edition of Cook's Illustrated that had a pretty interesting article about broiling salmon in a variety of sauces. Having never broiled salmon before, we jumped on this article and proceeded to dissect it :) We quickly discovered that this "How to Broil Salmon" article was incredibly confusing - every sauce recipe (there were 5 of them) refers to a part of one of the other recipes! *grr*

We finally figured it out and went with the cilantro pesto sauce - a very refreshing flavor for a hot summer evening. But we soon ran into bigger problems - the broiler didn't quite seem to be working! So, we had to stick with using the oven instead - the flavors were great, but we didn't quite get the crispy crust we wanted. I think we're going to try the crushed potato chips + bread crumbs for the crust the next time around.

We seasoned the salmon fillets (about 1 lb) with some olive oil, kosher salt and pepper and let it sit under the broiler for about 7-9 minutes. In the meantime, we made up the sauce by blending these:

1 bunch cilantro
5-6 cloves of garlic
1 bunch scallions
1 jalapeno
juice of 1 lemon

We went back and forth on whether we wanted shallots or onions or scallions. And the scallions were perfect - not overwhelming, just a little pungent, quite yummy!

Hmm ... broiler disaster! So, we upped the oven temperature to about 475, let the salmon bake for a couple more minutes and then coated it with the pesto, rolled it in panko and stuck it back in the oven for another 7-9 minutes. Hmm ... still not browned! Another 7 minutes? That helped some, but this crispy crust needs some work!

Well, the sauce perfectly complemented the salmon, so no complaints there! And our sides were perfect - roast potatoes with onions, cumin and a dash of cayenne and green beans cooked in a soy-rice vinegar reduction with sesame seeds. The green beans side was the star of the night, I'll need to cook that again soon!

The picture I took was way too lame to post, I'll just have to cook this again for a good picture :)