We may be approaching a glut. Quite an achievement I think given our garden is about 10 feet square. But the lovely purple beans we planted onto an 8 foot wigwam in the spring is simply laden and the more we pick the more we get. Magic.
Last week I dry fried beans with pickled turnips, a little beef mince and lots of chilli heat, the week before I stir fried beans to go with ma po tofu and the week before that sliced some raw into a green salad. Next week I will cook some to go with roast beef Sunday night and stew some with tomatoes as a side dish to pork chops.
Last night I consulted the trusty Charmaine Solomon and found a recipe for spicy bean curry that also used a ripe tomato from the garden. There is a really unattractive photo of the finished dish - the book was first published about 30 years ago and the photos are from the original. It shows a bowl of beans floating in a muddy brown liquid and otherwise unadorned. Makes you realise just how far the art of food porn has progressed! For some reason though the image has stuck with me and, upon the picking of the beans it was definitely what I wanted to be making with them.
Over rice it made for a really quick simple, well flavoured mid week supper. Good enough to buy beans for should you not have your own wigwam.
Spicy Fried Beans
Use any kind of bean - broad beans, skinny beans, french beans, snake beans - they all go well with this kind of spicing
500g tender beans
1 tbspn ghee or oil
1 medium onion, finely chopped
1 tbspn grated ginger
1 tspn ground turmeric
1 tspn garam masala
1/2 tspn chilli powder
1 tspn salt
2 ripe tomatoes, chopped or 1/4 cup hot water
squeeze of lemon juice
Top and tail beans, remove strings if necessary and cut them into bite size pieces. Heat the ghee ina saucepan and fry the onions and ginger over a medium low heat until the onions is golden - about 15 minutes.
Add the turmeric, garam masala, chilli powder and salt and fry for 2 minutes.
Add tomatoes or water and cook, stirring, until the tomatoes are cooked to a pulp and most of the liquid evaporates.
Add beans and stir well. Partially cover the pan with a lid and cook until the beans are just tender - about 5 minutes. Do not overcook.
Stir in lemon juice to taste and serve with plain boiled rice or as one of a number of dishes.
Perfect seasonal treat.
2 comments:
There's nothing like a nice glut is there? Our garden is a bit bigger than yours but monsewer got fed up with digging when he had his little veg patch so now we too have veg in all sorts of resceptacles. There was a wigwam of beans but it died. What lived is a kind of TV mast affair which sprang up in the bucket where he planted the 4th plant. We've been eating off that for weeks. The beetroots are almost ready from behind the dustbins. Apparently you can cook the and eat the leafy part too. I didn't know that. My German friend throws up her hands in horror when we cook the greens from cauliflowers (when you can get them) so God knows what she'll think of beet tops!
Beet tops shredded and steamed in a bit of butter would be a treat methinks! Do you cook cauli greens in with the curly tops or separate?
Your garden sounds very productive. I tried to grow beetroot last year but they didn't happen. Don't know why. This year I had a healthy looking marrow plant that something attacked one night and ate all the leaves so that was the end of that. Too sad.
Funny that monsewer got sick of the digging. The man doesn't mind doing that, is happy watering everything but will not for love or money weed. It is the moment it becomes my garden!
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