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You would think that green beans would be easy to cook. And you would probably be right. But all the recipes I looked up on Epicurious were very complicated, seating the green beans in the midst of a bunch of other ingredients, and last night, I was too tired for ingredients. I just wanted to cook something healthy that was not pasta, so I made a run to the local New Leaf grocery store, which is essentially a Whole Foods, or, for those of you in Montana, a Good Food Store. At New Leaf, I bought a boneless, skinless chicken breast, and asked them to cut it in half (note to self: next time, be sure to ask the butcher to cut it in half horizontally; cutting in half the other way doesn't give any advantages in terms of making the breast thinner for faster cooking time). I also picked up half a pound of fresh green beans--okay, I don't know that it was half a pound, but who's going to check?
In other New Leaf notes, egg nog is now available, which is the first sign of the holidays. I'm currently on my second egg nog and bourbon of the evening. Okay, okay, so it's my third.
Google mentioned sauteeing green beans, so I decided to wing it. However, it did mention trimming the strings from the beans, so I set to doing so. That took a while. And then it took a while more. It took me so long, in fact, that I realized that cutting green beans belongs in a French movie, perhaps featuring Marion Cotillard and Gerard Depardieu, chopping green beans and drinking melancholy glasses of red wine and brooding philosophically. After I finished trimming the beans, the couscous and chicken breasts were starting to cook rapidly, so I chose a haphazard strategy of piling up all the beans and slicing at them at random, which worked surprisingly well, probably better than I deserved.
It was one of my more chaotic cooking experiments, and that says a lot. Here's the evidence of chaos:
Pretty chaotic, considering all I had the energy to do was throw instant couscous in a pan and cook chicken in olive oil with salt and pepper, and cook green beans in olive oil. So chaotic that the smoke from the chicken set off the smoke alarm, which was a first. I think that means I've earned my stripes as a cook now, right?
I reckon this hasn't happened before because our old stove at the SF apartment had built-in fans for ventilation, while the new stove does not. Next time, I will open windows first.
Somehow, some way, order appeared from chaos.
All in all, not my best effort. I put too much water in the couscous, which caused absorption problems, and I had to drain and fluff and do some remedial heating to bring it up to the right consistency. The chicken was tasty and tender on the inside, but was perhaps excessively crispy. Still, it wasn't bad for being exhausted.
But short of baking green beans into a casserole, does anyone have good, simple ideas for spicing up their preparation?
1 comment:
What you did sounds creative and probably more tasty than what I do with green beans but I am going to tell you my usual way. First of all, we had them growing in our garden, and they didn't really have much in the way of strings- I wonder if yours really had significant strings. I would pinch off the stem end and snap off the little pokey curl at the bottom. Then I steam them in my nifty steamer that opens up like an umbrella to sit in a pot of water boiling under it, with a lid on top. When they are just tender crisp I get em out of there and put on some butter and salt and voila. I don't love them a lot because they squeak when you eat them, like live mice. But it's very simple. Sometimes I go with a casserole arrangement where after steaming them a bit I put them in with some white sauce of cream of mushroom soup and bake em a while, like that thanksgiving dish. You may be getting a steamer for Christmas!
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