What's that saying, when life hands you lemons, make lemonade? What about, when life hands you tough overgrown borlotti beans... stew them up with tomatoes?
At the end of a busy day, multi-tasking the housework, all I wanted to do was sit down and relax with a book. But my mind wouldn't switch 'off'. I knew if I stood in the vegie patch for a few minutes, I'd re-find my equilibrium. That or I'd go crackers looking at the work I needed to do with my end-of-summer patch.
I bent to say hello to the borlotti beans one last time - they were on my to-do list, to pull out, as they'd finished flowering and popping out their pretty speckled pods. However, they had other plans, and decided to prove me wrong - that or they were having a last hurrah - and I found, amongst the flat yellowing leaves I'd been ignoring for a week - a great handful of swollen pods. Big daddies.
I took them inside, chopped them up and threw them in a pan with some of the glorious garlic I'd bought at the farmers market that morning. I added a slosh of white wine and some roughly chopped tomatoes. I was aiming for a sauce, but the tomatoes released more liquid than I anticipated, so I ended up with a kind of sweet chunky stew. But I achieved my aim of softening those big beans: the vigorous bubbling and good slurp of olive oil meant the pods and the beans inside turned tender in the velvety sauce.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Word-verification is on, as the robot-spammers are loving my tuna past bake too much at the moment! I hope you understand - and I hope you'll still leave a comment at Dig In. I love hearing your thoughts, knowing someone is reading, and will always reply. Unless you're a robot-spammer.