December 08, 2010

Thanksgiving 2010 Part 3: Orange Green Beans

Green beans are a staple at every holiday meal. We've gone through our fair share of variations: canned green beans with cream of mushroom soup, with and without those delicious crispy fried onions, fresh green beans with simple garlic, oil and S&P, to roasted green beans. One year, I made green beans with orange rinds and while it was good, it didn't absorb the orange flavoring as much as I would have like. This year, I tried to cut the rinds smaller and crushed them a little more to really get that orange flavor and I think it worked. 

While I'm a fan of canned food and veggies (my pantry is consistently stocked with canned corn and numerous canned tomatoes), I think this dish is best made with fresh green beans and during the holidays, these are bountiful and reasonably priced.  - 1.29 a lb, yes please!

Orange Green Beans
1-2 lbs of fresh green beans, clipped and washed
2 tbsp butter
1 small handful of chopped bacon
3 cloves of garlic, sliced thin
Rind from one small to medium orange, sliced into strips
Juice and orange segments from that same orange
1/3 cup of broth and white wine (whatever portion you would like)
S&P

1. Make sure your green beans are cleaned and washed.  
2. Get all the bacon, garlic (in the pic below, only the rinds and everything on the right is for this dish.  Trust me, not using all that bacon!) and orange rind ready before you turn on the heat.

3. Add butter to a pan big enough to eventually hold the green beans and liquid. Add in the bacon and let it cook to ooze out that bacon goodness. Then add in the garlic, orange rinds and let those flavors mix togehter.  Yum! 
4. Add in the green beans, orange segments and juice. Give it a good mix. Add in a dash of S&P (a little less on the salt since you do have bacon).
5. Turn the heat down to medium low and pour in the 1/3 cup of liquid. Cover and let this steam/cook for about 3 minutes. Then take the cover off and let it cook for another 3 minutes. Do a quick taste test and add more S&P as necessary.  If you had garlic powder, I'm sure a dash of that would be delicious too!

6.  It's nice if you let it sit a little bit so the flavors are really absorbed into the green beans.  I made this an hour before dinner started, took about 10 minutes start to finish and let it sit the remaining time. Enjoy!

1 comment:

  1. Those look yummy, Helen! I'm going to make them for my Christmas Eve dinner!

    ReplyDelete