What to do with overdeveloped string beans:

It might be a little late to be posting this for 2004, unless you live in a very temperate zone and your vines haven't yet succumbed to cold and damp. I harvested my last pole beans in mid-October, and that's about as late as I can recall for this far north. But as a procedure it'll work whenever you have beans that weren't picked until they got oversized. So if you ever have pole beans that you didn’t get to pick before they overdeveloped, and now they’re bulging with seeds and hence not really candidates for boiling or braising, here’s a way to make them taste unbelievably great.

Heat oven to 450°F

Snap off the ends of the beans and any strings that come off with these (not many probably, if you grew traditional pole varieties like Blue Lake), wash and dry. Per 1 lb. of beans mix together:

1-2 tbs. olive oil
1-2 cloves crushed garlic
1/2 inch crushed fresh ginger (I put it through the garlic press)
salt & pepper to taste

Put the beans on a baking sheet or in a shallow baking dish, pour the dressing over them, and tosss with your hands so that all the beans are well coated and lying flat in a single layer on the baking sheet. Roast for 15-20 mins. (middle shelf), tossing once or twice, until beans are browned (even blackened in places), Serve immediately, either as a side dish or tossed with a tubular pasta (penne, rigatoni, tortiglioni) as a main dish.

The beans I prepared this way – three times in the first two weeks of October – were fantastic. The pods were almost crisp and perfectly edible, and the seeds inside had steamed and were smooth and creamy. I ate them with pasta. A little crumbled feta, grated pecorino, or ricotta salata, would have been a great topping, I think, but they tasted so good as they were that I just didn’t bother. I did add a thinly sliced de-seeded Anaheim pepper from in my garden, which added additional flavor and color (they had turned red by then). On one ocasion I omitted the ginger and the dish tasted just as good.

Note: Jack Bishop (see book source below) says this method will also make wilted beans taste great, and I guess it would, although if they were the thinner French-style green beans that markets usually offer, I imagine you'd have to cut the cooking time to 10 minutes or so. I know I'm going to be tempted to treat store-bought beans this way at some point before the next growing season, since they're never completely fresh to start with when you buy them here in the winter amd spring (they've presumably been picked hundreds of miles away, several days before they reach the store, and refrigerated/iced while in transit).

Seed source: Territorial Seed Company, “Blue Lake Pole”, http://www.territorial-seed.com
Recipe source: “Roasted Green Beans with Garlic & Ginger.” In Jack Bishop’s Vegetables Every Day (HarperCollins, 2001). A great book, currently remaindered for about $10.