What's for dinner: Sichuan green beans (Szechuan green beans)
Posted by 3Dsound at Tuesday, April 15, 2008 6:11 PM and is filed under Food,draggin' the line,Chile,Vegetarian,Pork,What's for dinner,Recipe 
6th in a food series (updated below)
Draggin' the line
This is one of those dishes 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 versions of this dish that it's easy to cobble together a procedure that'll work in your house. My version is reproduced below. It suits us, despite its requiring a healthy number of special Asian condiments. Also, this version turns out saucier than what you get in a Chinese restaurant, but the sauce tastes good with 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 ($1.99 per pound), trimmed
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 ($6.99 per pound), finely grated
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 beans tasted so good last night that my daughter and I decided to try them again tonight, except tonight I included the chile garlic sauce ($2.59 per 8-ounce bottle), which I was out of yesterday. And then we debated whether we liked the beans better mild or spicey .... SPICEY definitely won out. The mild beans were delicious enough, but chile turns food into something more than what it is – And that's what chile garlic sauce did for these green beans.Should the chile plant be unnerved, in its own plant way, to hear that my daughter and I preferred our Sichuan green beans best, when they tasted hot and spicey from the addition of chile? After all, chile plants produce the irritant capsaicin to protect themselves against herbivores, such as my daughter and myself. Yet, this first line of the chile plant's defense seems to have backfired on it. I wonder how often that happens in plant-herbivore relations.
What's for dinner? See the series.
Now who would've guessed...recipes!!!! I love it.
Oh, and the iris is yours.
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Consider it stolen recycled!
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