Tuesday: Two-bean soup

Barley soup with green beans, carrot and white beans.

This warm and wintry soup was made with our frozen green beans. Soup is a nice application for them - they have a good flavor, but it's impossible to replicate the texture of fresh green beans.

Monday: Cashew Curry

Coconut milk cashew curry on basmati rice.

For some reason unknown to us, cashew nuts go extremely well with cruciferous vegetables. In fact, a nice way to punch up plain broccoli or kale is a topping of chopped, toasted cashew nuts. This curry takes advantage of that natural pairing, adding green beans, tofu, and coconut milk. Served on basmati rice, it was a filling and straightforward almost-one-pot meal.

Super Bowl Sunday (with Gumbo!)

Vegetarian gumbo with homemade crackers.

Gumbo is a thick soup, really more of a stew, which puts the natural sliminess of okra to good use. It comes to us from Louisiana, and so we felt it was appropriate to make as we cheered on the New Orleans Saints in Super Bowl XLIV.

We had always thought of okra as the defining constituent of gumbo, but Wikipedia informs us that either okra or filé powder can be used as the thickener. (Filé powder is dried, ground sassafras leaves - we have yet to add it to our spice collection.) The recipe that we (loosely) followed actually called for both. Apparently this is not very authentic, nor is the addition of tofu. Gumbo would typically include shellfish, pork, or poultry.

In addition to the okra and/or filé powder, a roux base is used to make gumbo just a little bit thicker. To make a roux, flour is cooked in butter or oil over medium-low heat until it reaches the desired color, which can range from golden (a light roux) to copper-brown (a dark roux). Here, we started the gumbo with a dark roux.

To go with the gumbo, Giselle made crackers following Mark Bittman's recipe from How to Cook Everything. These made use of our half-white flour from Cayuga Pure Organics, and they were topped with salt and nigella seeds.

Friday: This is your brain on tofu

Scrambled tofu with bell pepper, green beans and carrots.

By "scrambled tofu," we really just mean a stir fry with hard tofu crumbled in and cooked gently until warmed through. This is an easy way to use up odds and ends of vegetables you have lying around. In addition to a little ginger and garlic sauteed to start, we seasoned with some soy sauce at the end.

Sunday dinner: Pilaf party palace

Green bean and black-eyed pea pilaf.

A pilaf (or pullao, depending on where you're coming from geographically) is any dish in which vegetables are cooked slowly in rice. This can be done on the stovetop over very low heat, or in a sealed pot in the oven. We improvised this dish, in which frozen green beans from our CSA were mixed with sauteed onion, canned black-eyed peas, coriander powder, fenugreek seed, garam masala, and a little cayenne. Here we used two cups rice to three cups water, about the correct ratio if you want to replicate this in any quantity.

Monday: Dal, with special guest chef

Toor dal with tomato and green beans.

As the seasons change, the menu here at D4SA changes in turn: here we have the first dal of the fall. In brief, dal refers to any of a number of split lentils in Indian cuisine. As anyone who has seen the dal shelf at our apartment surely knows, that number is rather large. We typically make a lot of dal in the wintertime, as it's a bit too heavy for the heat of summer, and green veggies aren't as easy to come by in the colder months. Stay tuned to learn more about the universe of dal...

This particular dish is toor (sometimes called toovar/tuvar/arhar) dal - which is actually dried, split yellow pigeon peas. It's flavored with mustard seed, lemon juice, brown sugar (jaggery if you have it), cayenne, fenugreek, cumin, turmeric, ginger, and cilantro.

Our enthusiastic guest sous chef Laura chopped the green beans precisely to specifications.


Laura, with the fruits of her labor

Tuesday: Haricots Verts

Broiled catfish with haricots verts in a lemon-garlic dressing and wild rice.

Haricots verts ("green beans" in French) are small and slender green beans. Giselle is something of a green bean skeptic, as she dislikes the overwhelming "green" flavor that they sometimes have, but she gave these haricots verts her seal of approval. They had a light sweetness and they stayed particularly crisp when cooked.

The lemon-garlic dressing was interesting and turned out to compliment the fish very nicely. We melted some butter in a small saucepan on low heat and then added one clove of garlic and cooked it in the butter for a few minutes. We took the pan off the heat and let it sit for a few minutes, then removed the garlic, added salt, and stirred in lemon zest.

Monday: purple "green" beans

Green bean-chickpea salad with pita.

As you will no doubt have noticed, things just improved markedly in the photography department here. We have a new digital camera, which means no more blurry, dark, or muted pictures. In fact, these were even taken on manual settings (well, ok, aperture priority for any photo geeks out there).

And in case you didn't believe us about the purple green beans - yes, they really were purple. Sadly, they lose their color as soon as you cook them:



But don't they look pretty beforehand?

Sunday light dinner

Tonight we were still recovering from our huge brunch of blueberry pancakes and scrambled eggs, so we went for a simple vegan dinner: green beans with walnut-miso sauce and soba (buckwheat) noodles, with another glass of homemade ginger ale.

And for dessert:



Local peaches (first of the year!) with a glass of Milk Thistle Farm milk.