Smothered Green Beans with Carrot Sticks and Mortadella or Ham
While I was snapping the beans for this recipe I was transported back to my childhood. My mom was one of the original organic farmers back in 60s. Since they had not yet discovered new natural pesticides to use it meant that my sisters and I became the chief bug killers for our crops. We didn’t do a great job, which meant that many of the beans that we harvested had been chewed on a bit by the wee beasties. We had to do lots of cutting away of the bad spots before we could cook any. That was not the case for the beautiful beans that I used for this recipe. Beautiful beans in January? I can only wonder from what fair clime these beans came. I don’t want to wonder how they became flawless…
This recipe starts by cooking the beans in salted water until crisp tender. Then the beans, matchstick sized carrot sticks and chopped mortadella were cooked in butter. I am not normally a mortadella fan because the fattiness of it doesn’t appeal to me. However, in this dish it shines. The combination of flavors was incredible. Simple, but very tasty. I did use a high quality mortadella that is made here locally. Volpi, which many of you will be familiar with is made here is St. Louis and shipped all over the world. We are very proud to have them here.
This is another great recipe. I am going to put this one up against my mom’s favorite green bean recipe this summer and see which one the family likes better!
Snapping beans also takes me back to my childhood, in my grandmother’s kitchen. She used to snap beans before boiling them for a side dish to her magnificent roasts.
I didn’t snap any beans myself until I cooked Marcella’s lamb and bean stew.
The beans could have come from Florida, Beth. Locally grown beans have shown up in the market recently, and they can be good. I have never, however, had beans in this country, not on Long Island, not in California, not here in Florida, that approach the flavor of the many varieties of green beans grown in Italy. The next time the traveling Pomodori happen to be renting a place with a kitchen in Venice during the summer, they should go to Rialto and pick up a pound or two of the tegoline from S. Erasmo. Cooked 6 to 7 minutes in salted boiling water, drained, sprinkled with sale marino, aceto di vino, and tossed with olive oil from the western shore of Lake Garda. Let Ferran Adrià or Thomas Keller match that!