Thursday: It's been so long, beans

 

Long beans cooked with mustard seeds and red pepper, served with toor dal and basmati rice.

It's been quite a while since long beans last appeared on the blog - but it'd be more often if we could find them more frequently!  These relatives of black-eyed peas have a deep, delicious flavor with less of the harsh greennness of green string beans, and have an almost dry but chewy texture.  In this recipe from Madhur Jaffrey's World of the East, they were flavored with asafoetida, mustard seeds, cumin, toasted urad dal, dried red chilies and cayenne pepper, and at the end of cooking we added grated coconut.  If you have those ingredients on hand, you could try this preparation with normal green beans too.  We really loved this dish.

Tuesday: yet another vegetable that can be purple

Garlic-sauteed purple long beans with pan-fried tofu and sesame.

Meet the long bean. You may have seen it before, but probably only if you shop in South or East Asian groceries:



They resemble green beans in flavor (Giselle actually prefers them), but their texture is slightly firmer and as you can see they are.....longer. This is the first time we've ever found long beans at a farmers' market, and the first time we have EVER seen purple long beans anywhere. Hooray!



Unlike purple green beans, they also retain their color when cooked. (For this meal, we blanched them for about four minutes, followed by a brief stir-fry.)