We planted some more today, and checked on a lot of our little plants. Here’s what’s growing around here…
.:.
We planted some more today, and checked on a lot of our little plants. Here’s what’s growing around here…
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now is the time for our first planting of greenbeans to be left alone and allowed to go to seed. this means that we are simply letting the mature beans dry on the vine until the pods are brown and gross looking (when they even look like they’re molding or something… which they usually aren’t unless you’ve had tons of rain). once the pods look brown and funky, you rattle the pods to hear if the beans are wiggling inside. if they are, then the pods are ready to be harvested and the beans are ready to be removed and saved. you can see from the photo below that the beans in the ziploc bag are darker red/brown. they were collected at the right time, whereas the other beans were collected perhaps a little too soon and some are lighter in color or small and a little funny shaped. i’m not yet sure if these beans will be as fruitful as the others, but we’ll find out next year!
i also tried another experiment with bean seed preservation, which involved dehydrating (using the dehydrator) some large and tough beans that were still green. as expected, the beans did not really cure, since they need to stay on the vine until their nature-designed time for becoming viable seeds. it was still an interesting experiment, though, and i’m glad to know a bit more about curing our seeds for next year!
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today i spent a portion of the day pickling some our veggies for eating later in the year.
so far, jason has been the only pickling champion in the house so today i decided to try my hand at it.
i did 6 jars of veggies today… 2 jars of arkansas pickling cucumber slices, 1 jar of arkansas pickling cucumber spears, 1 jar of arkansas and white wonder cucumber spears, 1 jar of green tomatoes, and 1 jar of greenbeans.
i did some experimenting with spices, so we’ll see how that goes!
two weeks from now, we’ll see how they taste!
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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.
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!
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?
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my mom makes the best green bean casserole, partly because she always uses green beans from my dad’s garden and partly because, well, she doesn’t open up any cans while making it–she makes it from scratch. this is not the first or the last of oma’s recipes that you’ll see on our blog (oma is the german name for grandmother–the name my mom wants to be called once grandkids arrive).
i just tried my hand at recreating her recipe a few days ago, and i can say that i think i did a pretty good job. maybe you’re thinking, “it’s not thanksgiving… why the sudden enthusiasm about green bean casserole?”
well, as is the tradition with farm food friday, i try to share some recipes that highlight a certain homestead ingredient that we (or you) might have a lot of or might just really love eating! hence the green bean casserole idea.
a little bit about my love for green beans: it started so early that i can always remember loving them, even as a young child. i loved them so much, in fact, that in my school days i would always say that green beans were my favorite food when asked. all the other kids would look at me like i was crazy, since they had all said pizza, ice cream, or spaghetti. i also can’t seem to write or type green bean as two words, and i have to backspace and correct myself each time because instead i type greenbean. i don’t think my interest in compound words is to blame, rather that i’ve always imagined that green beans are the beans, worthy of mono-word-dom. all other beans are secondary to me, and i imagine they always will be.
so now that you know what sort of greenbean fanatic i am (yes, the vote is in and i can now resume using greenbean rather than green bean), you might be even more interested in this week’s farm food friday recipe. yum!
the ingredients:
the gear:
the directions:
p.s. an added bonus to this recipe… it tastes even better as leftovers, since the rue and vegetable flavors have had time to meld. next time i plan to make a double batch so that it lasts longer in our house than just for 2 meals.
.:.
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