The First Dud

Last night I returned to a new favorite for dinner. Honey Ginger Chicken Bites were exactly what we all wanted. That chicken is so good. This time I made it with all chicken thighs, and I left out the orange zest, and that's the way it should be made. So good served over a bed of basmati rice. I figured that since we were having a tried and true for dinner, I could do something different for a side dish- and I chose some green beans I had in the freezer. Do you know how hard it is to actually find a recipe for plain old green beans? I flipped through several cookbooks looking for something, and was amazed that I went through 4 vegetarian cookbooks before I found one do-able recipe.

The cookbook I used last night was 1,000 Vegetarian Recipes by Carol Gelles. One of my favorite Chickpea salads is from this book, so I had high hopes for the green bean recipe I chose. Garlic Green Beans was simple enough to not compete with the chicken, and also was a little more than plain green beans. It just wasn't anything to write home about. I took green beans and crushed garlic and tossed them together in olive oil. The cooked for about 5 minutes before being squeezed with lemon juice and sprinkled with salt and pepper. It sounds like it would be good, but it really wasn't. Tossing the garlic in with the beans really resulted in the garlic being steamed with the beans instead of infusing the whole dish with flavor. It was pretty disappointing. Next time I will stick with my standard treatment for garlicky green beans where the garlic is cooked first to release it's flavor and then tossed with beans. Although I like the idea of adding lemon, so I'll do that too.

So now that I've encountered my first dud recipe in my challenge, I'm trying to decide what my treatment should be towards the bad. I am considering that once I've cooked one recipe in each book, I need to go back to the bad recipes and find something else from those books to make. Kind of a three strikes and you're out program. We'll see. Getting through all my cookbooks may be a challenge in the first place. So far I've got good steam, but I doubt I'll be able to keep this pace up for long. On tap for tonight is something with tortellini...