Greek "oily" green beans

For those who still have a green bean surplus ...

Whilst in Greece we had a bowl of green beans, cooked in the Greek λαδερά or "oily" style. No, bear with me. This is good quality olive oil, which takes the flavours of the dish and must be mopped up with fresh bread at the end. The essentials are beans, tomato, olive oil and flat leaf parsley. What also interested me about the ones we had is that the beans were what I'd normally consider being slightly over, when the pods have started to fill out a bit. But the long cooking time (45 mins) makes them good. And because there is no draining off of cooking water, you get to eat all the vitamins and minerals rather than pour them down the sink

Rather than type up a recipe here, I'll just put in this pointer to the rather wonderful greekrecipe.com:

http://www.greek-recipe.com/green-beans-in-tomato-sauce/

Now I've just noticed that we don't have a recipe for the essential partner, Greek χωριάτικο ψωμί, (horiatiko psomi - village bread). Neither does greekrecipe.com. Hmm, I'll see what I can find.

I can sense from the silence that I need a harder sell here than the Indian bean recipe ... Bear in mind that olive oil has some fairly unique health benefits (according to Trust me, I'm a doctor at least !).

I cooked up a batch of these last night, and they were good. A couple of things struck me about the greekrecipe.com version. The lack of seasoning with pepper may just be because they assume you will do it automatically, but I also thought that the versions I had in Greece have been more flavoured - usually some garlic (I added a couple of cloves) and some spicing; sometimes a little cumin, or more often cinnamon; this, with the bit of sweetness from well ripened tomatoes and the olive oil gives the most "Greek" taste to my mind, so I added 1/4 tsp of ground cinnamon towards the end of cooking.

Go on, give it a go !

Sometimes, I read a post and respond in my head - not really helpful on a forum! I looked at the recipe after your first post and thought I might try it, though as you correctly surmised, it doesn't look as attractive as the Indian recipe. Got to do something as we have a serious bean overload right now. Trouble is, the man works away a lot, so I grow for 2 but much of the time cook for 1.

I'll give them a go when I've got my next bean glut. I've just put a pile of spicy beans in the freezer.