time again for greenbeans!!!!
(for some background information about why i insist on writing greenbeans instead of green beans, click here)
what a wonderful day it is! the greenbeans that we cooked tonight did not come from our garden, actually, but from my father’s garden. our greenbeans went in a little later than his did and we shouldn’t be getting any from our plants for a week or so. we almost waited until ours came in to eat any, but we just couldn’t resist my dad’s offer of about 5 pounds of delicious, homegrown greenbeans!
we cooked all of them tonight, cooking them the way we usually do… boiling them in water with a dash of salt and olive oil or coconut oil. we’ve determined that it is a waste of time for us to snap them into “manageable” sized pieces since we enjoy them best whole, with just the stems snapped off. we usually serve them in a glass casserole dish because the beans fit in there perfectly and a dish that has a lid makes for excellent fridge storage.
freshly served, steaming greenbeans doused with coconut oil and salt!
when we serve the steaming hot greenbeans we add a dash of salt and drizzle some coconut oil over the top. so delicious! rarely do we use forks when eating such treasures and relish in picking up one at a time with our fingers and munching away! we’ve found that cooking the greenbeans without snapping them also makes for much better greenbean sandwiches with dill mayonnaise (it sounds bizarre but they are fantastic!). the long greenbeans rarely fall off of the bread this way.
an amazing bi-product of boiling the greenbeans is the pot liquor that is left behind. some foods, such as various greens, leave behind a liquid that is not beneficial and even harmful for you to drink. not greenbeans! greenbeans leave behind a pot liquor (we call it greenbean water) that is rich with the nutrients of the greenbeans, in a concentrated form!
greenbean water, still in the pot. though it may look funky, we promise it tastes amazing!
this might also sound bizarre but it is delicious! we save the greenbean water in the fridge and drink it, sometimes adding a little bit of soy sauce for extra flavor. such extra flavor is not required, by the way, because greenbean water (if you’ve added salt and one of the above-mentioned oils) is already refreshing and even creamy. you can feel the nutrients as you drink it.
cheers to that! perhaps we could toast with greenbean water sometime during the wedding?
.:.