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We’ve packed up Chez Foie for the week and headed to the shore. Annual family vacation, three generations in one 3 -story beach rental. Which has made the cooking both amazing and complicated. I’m very used to cooking what I want without a lot of restrictions. But this week there is a sort of vegan, a picky teen, an omnivorous tween, a black pepper allergy, several folks with sodium issues, hot pepper aversions, a mycophobe, only half of us eat seafood, and my sister and I are both trying to slim things down a bit. So the challenge is to keep everyone healthy, happy and sated, without resorting to the normal crutches of salt, spice, heat, or fat to keep things tasty.
It’s helped that it is peak season for all sorts of fruits and vegetables. If you ever take a road trip with me in July/August, take this as your warning now — I see no reason to ever pass up a roadside farmstand. There is no good reason. Maybe if you were in labor and we were on the way to the hospital I would skip the freshly picked peaches. But I cannot commit to that at this very moment. I honestly once made a friend pull over on the way to a wedding because I saw some particularly good corn on an honor stand on the country road we were driving down. (We were still totally on time for the ceremony AND we had corn and tomatoes for breakfast the next morning. Win. Win.)
So on the drive down this week, there was the frequent cry of CORN right. TOMATOES left. CHERRIES!!!!!! OMG CANTALOUPE AND WATERMELON AT THE NEXT RIGHT. Pull over. Pull over. Pull over. The result was a super fragrant car and a backseat filled with loads of melons, drupes, herbs, leafy greens, roots, tubers, and rhizomes.
So while there is sort of a basic plan each day for dinner, the vegetables have been just a matter of what I pull out first, and what preparation seems to go with the mains. Last night was a horseradish encrusted salmon for the fish eaters, baby lamb chops for the meat eaters, and miso quinoa salad for the vegetarian/vegan contingent. Lime and ginger are flavors I would naturally put with each of those proteins, so as I was sitting on the porch topping and tailing a basket of string beans, a plan came together.
I put 1 pound of trimmed green beans into a pot of boiling water, and cooked until tender but still had a good snap to them, about 8 minutes.
I melted a tablespoon of butter in a skillet and added a 3-inch chunk of ginger, peeled and cut into fine matchsticks, and the juice of 1/2 lime, and cooked until the ginger was golden and the the mixture was fragrant. I drained the beans, and tossed them in into the butter and cooked for about 3 minutes before placing in a bowl and tossing with the finely grated zest of 1/2 lime
