This is a green bean dish that you might enjoy at a Chinese restaurant and wonder why you don't make it at home. Fortunately, the internet serves up enough different recipes for this dish, it's easy to cobble together a procedure that'll work for you. My recipe is reproduced below. It suits us, despite its requiring a healthy number of special Asian condiments. Also, my version turns out saucier than what you get in a Chinese restaurant, but the sauce tastes good on rice.

Tonight I served these green beans with long grain brown rice (4 cups for $1.50, on sale) and pork loin chops ($1.99 per pound, on sale).

Ingredients
1½ pound fresh green beans, trimmed ($1.99 per pound)
1½ teaspoon hot chile sesame oil (House of Tsang brand "Mongolian Fire Oil")
1½ teaspoon dark sesame oil
pinch dried red chile flakes (which adds less heat than the 1 tablespoon of chile garlic sauce that I usually add but was out of)
4 clove garlic, crushed
2 tablespoon fresh ginger, finely grated ($6.99 per pound)
2 teaspoon black bean garlic sauce
1½ tablespoon mirin (sweet Japanese cooking wine) ($4.99 per 10-ounce bottle)
1 tablespoon water

Procedure
Gently fry the chile flakes in warm oil in a skillet over low heat. When the chile flakes darken, add the green beans and stir-fry for about 3 minutes. Then add the black bean garlic sauce, mirin and water, and continue stir-frying until the beans are almost done (about 4 minutes). Then add the garlic and ginger, and cook for another minute or two.


UPDATE, Wednesday, April 16, 2008: The green beans tasted so good last night that my daughter and I decided to try them again tonight, except tonight I included the 1 tablespoon of chile garlic sauce ($2.59 per 8-ounce bottle), which I was out of yesterday. Then we debated whether we liked the beans better when they were mild or spicy... SPICY definitely won out. The mild beans were delicious enough, but chile turns food into something more than what it is, which is what the chile garlic sauce did for these beans.

Having said that, shouldn't the chile plant be unnerved – in its own plant way – upon hearing that my daughter and I preferred our Sichuan green beans better, when they tasted hot and spicy from the addition of chile? After all, chile plants produce their irritant capsaicin as a protection against the depredations of herbivores like us. Yet, that first line of the chile plant's defenses seems to have backfired on it. How often does that happen in plant-herbivore relations?