Friday, July 25, 2008

chinese beans

chinese beans

A real treat! My husband brought home these beautiful green beans yesterday. A colleague of his shared them with us. He grew them in his garden. I don't know the name of the variety, but these beans are really delicious. Very firm and crispy, with a tart lemony flavor. The shape and pale green color of these very long beans is really lovely. I just cooked them the way I usually cook beans, but I'm hoping to find a Chinese recipe for them. I am very excited that the gardener offered to share some seeds with me this fall!

Fabaceae

10 comments:

qaz007 said...

those look realy good. I finaly found green beans in my garden today they are like 1/2 in. long.

Daphne Gould said...

Just a few days ago I posted about making Chinese Spicy Green Beans. The link is to the site where I found the recipe. They are delicious.

kathy said...

Thank you! The recipe sounds great. I look forward to trying the sauce.

Tonight I prepared the beans by parboiling briefly, then sautéeing in peanut oil with fresh onions and garlic. After cooking, I added hot sesame oil. This was delicious.

kathy said...

Hi qaz007, I enjoyed reading about the vegetables you like to grow. They sound great! Baby green beans are really cute. I enjoy the flowers too. The beans grow really fast.

Dan said...

I picked some potatoes yesterday as well, although my plants are not drying back yet but I stole some anyway. I made parmesan new potatoes on the grill, I put the recipe on my blog.

I have also had a large amount of rain/storms, I left a weeding
bucket out since last weekend and it has over 6" of water in it.

Anonymous said...

Not on topic, but appropriate for the date, in NE MA, July 26, 2008 .... rains of the past week, torrential, are trying to drown my plants all over. Perfectly healthy plants last week are wilting, as I think their roots are being drowned in clay created by the drainage situation. I have no idea how to fix this.

I had to rip out an entire squash plant patch, as so many stems were broken that the patch was all turned yellow and wilting. A few weeks ago it was all fat and green. Today it was like cut bait and go.

too much rain !!!!

Anonymous said...

There's a dish my family made using these beans (or regular green beans) that entailed a special kind of Chinese saurkraut (I guess you can call it).

Anyway, the rains have really been quite something, and they're just not letting up.

Good luck with the fall plantings -- I'm also looking to plant lettuce now. Our local gardening shop (Mahoney's in Allston) has already pulled all its seeds! :(

Anonymous said...

I think in the US these are what are usually called Yard Long Beans, and in Asia either Long Beans or Dragon Beans (Asia being on the metric system). I think these might also be the same as Noodle Beans?

Beyond the generic name, there are also a number of varieties available. I think there are red and green for example.

Sandhill has these in their miscellaneous types beans section. I think Baker Creek have several different kinds to choose from, and I'm sure many other places sell them as well.

I was thinking about growing these next year. I understand they need a hot growing season to do well, and so might be well suited to your area. I don't know if they would do well here.

Anonymous said...

This is how a chinese friend of mine cooked fresh beans when we were rooming together, though we only ever used regular beans from the grocery. It's very simple, but good.

-Add cooking oil to a wide shallow pan so it's 1/2 cm or so deep. Add several cloves of coarsely chopped garlic. (she always cooked vegetables with a *lot* of garlic, but that may have just been her preference)

-Heat the oil medium high, then add the beans. Stir them so they et coated with oil, and so they don't burn. Add a little soy sauce or salt now if you want.

-Cook until the beans are evenly shriveled. This should only be a few minutes. If the beans burn or turn black, the oil is too hot, if they don't shrivel, but just get soft, it's not hot enough.

-Eat!

kathy said...

These recipes sound great! Thanks for sharing them.

I've wondered what Yard Long Beans are like. They always look interesting in the catalogs, but I never dared try. I don't know what variety I was given, but I'm looking forward to growing them myself next year.