I've cooked my way through all 264 recipes
in The New Mediterranean Diet Cookbook!

June 18, 2010

Fassolakia Yiahni (p. 323)

You should hear me try to pronounce that. I'm much better at saying Ragout of Fresh Green Beans, which may also be more descriptive to you, gentle readers.

I received a ton of green beans in my CSA box last week, so it was time to use them up. I also received yellow (or white?) green beans. What are they? I have no idea and didn't even Google them. I just included them in this recipe.

In "a pan large enough to hold all the vegetables," sauté garlic and onions in olive oil. Every time the recipe calls for "a pan large enough to hold all the vegetables" I start with my biggest skillet, or else my 2.5 quart pot that I do pasta in. They are never big enough. Note to self: always choose the stock pot first. As with every other recipe that has said this, I had to upgrade pots midway through cooking.

Once the onions have softened (and this recipe includes two onions, so this process takes a while) add in the green beans (topped and tailed) and peeled potatoes cut into chunks. Stir everything together so that the onion/olive oil mixture coats all the beans, and then add in coarsely chopped tomatoes, a dried hot red chili and salt and pepper. Add a tiny bit of water and let this simmer for an hour.


Once the veggies are all soft and the tomatoes have become a sauce, the Fassolakia Yiahni is ready.


This is good, but a little sweeter than I like my veggies to be, probably because of the number of tomatoes (5!). Next time, more salt. It also makes a ton of food, so I froze about half of it because I'm going out of town for the weekend (Wilmington!) and I don't want it to all go bad.

Also, a note about olive oil. I actually ran out yesterday. I'd been using a 3 liter can of Earthfare olive oil (thanks Meg!) and incredibly, the last drips were used up yesterday. Please meet my new helper in this cooking project:


Yup, that's an extra 2 liters of olive oil loving.

tomatoes -- $7.57
onions -- $2.64
potatoes -- $2.92
beans: 4.88
Total Cost of Fassolakia Yiahni: $18.01

2 comments:

Thanks for dropping by! Love, Katrina.