Addicted to Green Beans

How can it be possible that I am addicted to green beans? Have you ever experienced a craving for a food that is so strong it is almost an addiction?

I suppose I am not exactly addicted to green beans, but in reality I just cannot get enough of green beans prepared in a manner that I am calling Greek because it makes me remember our great meal at Scholarhio in Athens. The recipe is in Donna Klein's "Vegan Italiano." I tried improving on the recipe by making the dish with grape tomatoes since I have long had a recipe for green beans using those little tomatoes. For some reason, the little ones just don't release the strong flavors the way a large beefsteak tomato does. This recipe is changed from the original only in halving the olive oil and tilting the bean/tomato ratio more toward tomatoes. Calling for just a few ingredients, the recipe's flavor payoff comes from cooking for an hour. You would think that by the time the beans had stewed for that long you would have a mushy mass turning grey and lacking in taste. Fortunately, the green beans remain quite green and the taste takes me back to the Plaka.

I served the beans with oven-roasted Greek potatoes and a Greek salad.

Here is Donna Klein's recipe. If you like this one, you will like many others in the Italiano cookbook and "The Mediterranean Vegan Kitchen."

1 Tablespoon olive oil
1 pound fresh green beans, trimmed
1 large tomato, seeded and chopped
2 large garlic cloves, pressed
½ teaspoon dried oregano
grind of sea salt
grind of black pepper
water as needed

In a large non-stick skillet with a lid, cook the green beans in the oil over medium-high heat, stirring and tossing often, about 5 minutes. Reduce the heat to medium-low and add the remaining ingredients, stirring well. Cover and cook until beans are very tender, about 1 hour, stirring occasionally and adding water as necessary to keep the mixture from drying out. Tastes fabulous warm or at room temperature (Florida room temperature!)

Off to The Boys Farmers Market to buy... green beans to make this again!

A week's menus

Possibly the best cornbread I ever made

Ingredients for my traditional chili

As promised yesterday, I am going to list what I had to eat during the past week beginning with today's dinner: chili made with beans and lots of chopped red and green peppers and cornbread made from a recipe in Real Food Daily Cookbook: Really Fresh, Really Good, Really Vegetarian by Ann Gentry and Anthony Head (link to Amazon, but the copy I used was borrowed from the public library). Lunch was leftover pizza with grilled vegetables and breakfast was a bowl of blueberries and sliced strawberries and a bowl of oatmeal with raisins and walnuts. Do you wake up as hungry as I do?

Another day the menus included
Breakfast: bowl of blueberries and sliced peaches and a bowl of oatmeal with raisins
Lunch: tostadas as posted yesterday
Dinner: Pizza with grilled vegetables and a salad

Dinner: quorn roast, baked potato with onion and mushroom gravy, corn on the cob, and spinach salad

Dinner: gazpacho, fakin' bacon club sandwich

Dinner: potato salad, coleslaw with rice vinegar, leftover gazpacho, salad with vegan ceasar dressing

Other meals were leftovers of the above and we ate out one night at a meet the artist reception for the opening of a show of photographs taken by the daughter of friends.

6 Steps to answer the dinner question

Big questions of the day: what to wear and what's for dinner. I can't help you with what to wear, but I do have some help for answering the what's for dinner question.

The other day I realized that great recipes are everywhere. They are online, in books, in magazines, in your head, on little cards at the grocery store. A search on Amazon for books using the term cookbook yields 102,622 results. And we are still looking for recipes. A lack of recipes is not the problem with deciding what to eat for dinner. The problem is menu planning, especially if you are focusing on wellness and eating more healthy foods. At least for me that is definitely the hardest part.

If I wait until I am hungry and it is time to eat a meal, I end up choosing whatever is fast and is easy to prepare. Even with vegan foods that often means I will be eating the more processed and least healthy choices in the kitchen.

Now that I know what is the most difficult task between me and a healthy meal, I have been putting more effort into planning menus for the week. I am naturally quite a planner and list maker, so I have easily found a system that works for me. I need to plan three meals a day.You might not need to plan so many meals, so you may have an easier task than I do. Even if breakfast is oatmeal with fruit (again) and lunch is leftovers from dinner (ideal), I need it in writing. Dinner is what takes the most effort to plan and prepare, but 3 meals a day must be in my own plan.

1. On my paper I write the seven days of the week and "B", "L" and "D" with enough space to add a brief list of the dishes for each meal. This should all be on the left side of the page so you can put your grocery list on the right.

2. It helps if at least some of the days are set meals. For instance on Monday or Tuesday, we go to the local pizza store to take advantage of their really great prices on those days. We order a pizza with just tomato sauce, stop at The Boys Market for a box of grilled vegetables, and finish our own pizza in the toaster oven. Sometimes when I really feel like cooking, I grill my own veggies. I gave up on the homemade pizza years ago because I just can't compete with a professional oven. Or maybe you have plans to eat out for lunch or dinner during the week and know you won't have to be shopping for ingredients for those meals. So that is one day.

3. Choose two menus that you like to prepare that will provide enough food to give you leftovers for dinner. That is four days more.

4. Think about what vegetables are in season and plan a dinner and lunch around them. Now we have 6 days of dinners planned.

5. Choose one more dinner based on beans, pasta, or rice depending on the other selections you have made so far.

6. Now you have menus written on your piece of paper for 7 dinners and any other meals you have planned. Look at the recipes you will use or review the ingredients in your head. Check your supplies in the kitchen to see what is missing. Write the items for your shopping list to the right of the menus.

If you need a little more help, check back tomorrow and I will share my meals from last week's menu planning.