Green Bean

I like to use a variety of shell beans for this dish. Because of their different sizes and shapes, cook each type of bean separately, dividing the other ingredients as necessary. You may need a little more oil if you have many varieties of beans. The starchy liquid from cooking the beans is delicious in the ragoût.

This was one of our first Sunday suppers at Lucques. It’s a variation on the classic osso buco, which is traditionally made with veal shanks. I use the same technique, but for this lighter summer version I braise the lamb shanks in white wine and a combination of veal and chicken stock (as opposed to straight veal stock). The tender shanks are a rich counterpoint to the freshness of the shell beans and crunch of the haricots verts. Ask your butcher for lamb osso buco, but if you can’t find it you can use lamb shanks.

Pork loin is a lean, delicate cut of meat compared to, say, a big, fatty chop, and this recipe is all about maximizing its taste and preserving its moisture. Applying the mustard marinade twice and roasting slowly with butter and herbs will simultaneously infuse the meat with complex flavor and help protect its precious internal juices. It’s very important to use a roasting rack, which helps the air circulate, resulting in even cooking.

This warm salad is pure southern France: tomatoes, olives, anchovies, basil, green beans, and soft-cooked eggs. It’s easy to make, but it helps to do some of the steps beforehand. As long as your spinach is cleaned and your haricots verts, potatoes, and eggs are cooked, you won’t have to do much until the last minute, when you’re pulling it all together. While your potatoes are roasting in the oven, light the grill, have a glass of rosé, and look calm, cool, and collected as you wait to finish the last-minute tasks. Recruit an unsuspecting guest or your significant other to grill the halibut while you brown the anchovy butter and finish the warm salad.

This simple almond-shallot topping goes with just about any simply cooked vegetable, but it tastes best with green beans. Instead of simply blanching the beans, I char them until they develop a smoky richness.

This pasta dish pairs creamy with crunchy, tart with sweet. Summer string beans also offer a little crunch to balance the juiciness of the tomatoes. I especially like using orange Sunbursts from my garden.

When I lived near Nice in the sunny south of France, I discovered that everyone there has a version of this summer salad. By tasting ones made by everyone from legendary chefs to humble housewives, I came up with my own. My sun-dried tomato vinaigrette makes this version distinctive. The perfumed sweetness of elderflower cordial highlights the concentrated sweetness of the tomatoes. Be sure to use the best sushi-grade bluefin or yellowfin tuna you can find.

Tangy goat cheese makes a perfect salad dressing for wax beans (haricots verts work well here, too). To balance the creamy cheese, I toss the sweet tomatoes with a bright, acidic vinaigrette. Together, they make an amazing summer salad.

Here is a salad I enjoyed on my first trip to Paris. It was part of a fantastic, produce-filled lunch in a private residence in Montmartre, overlooking much of the city. The key to this simple salad is to use the best possible ingredients—specially the green beans. Serve as a first course with slices of crusty, whole-grain baguette or Italian bread.

The ingredients of salade Niçoise—green beans, white beans, ripe tomatoes, and cured olives—join forces with pasta to make a delectable cold dish. Baked tofu stands in for tuna, another standard Niçoise ingredient.

I’ll always have a pleasant association with this classic Indonesian salad platter, as it was the first meal I had on my first trip to Paris. The tiny, cozy Indonesian restaurant was right next door to our hotel, and coming straight from an all-night flight, my friend Wendy and I were too tired to venture further before a meal and a nap. Served with plenty of rice, the salad (which always combines raw and lightly cooked vegetables) made for a filling and memorable meal. Here’s my Americanized, but still appealing interpretation.

One of my favorite things about Paris—after the museums, the streetscapes, the Seine, the style, the beauty, and so on—is the green beans. Yes, you read that right. Parisian green beans are ubiquitous, and always served perfectly ripe and tender-crisp. Here at home, perfect green beans seem to be available only for a month or so in the summer. This dish is a nice way to highlight them during that brief window; however, I’m so fond of it that I use frozen green beans so I can make this regularly. I highly recommend using organic whole baby green beans, if you can find them; otherwise, French-cut beans will do.

Slender green beans, slivered tempeh, and colorful bell pepper make for a tasty trio. The time-saver here is the use of frozen organic baby green beans, available in most any natural foods store and many supermarkets. If you have more time, do use fresh slender green beans, by all means, when they make their rare appearance at your local market.

Offering an attractive presentation of steamed fresh veggies, this is a nice change of pace from stir-fries. It’s a fresh-tasting meal that gets its personality from a luscious sauce.

While we love the snap of quickly blanched green beans, we also love this preparation, which leaves the green beans almost meltingly tender. They’re ready when they are completely soft and cooked through, and all the delicious seasonings have been absorbed by the beans. They are perfect alongside grilled or baked fish, or with our Veal Meatballs (page 48).

This lamb, green bean, and tomato soup-stew, known as fasoulia in the home of my childhood, was the by-product of a regular event: my father dissecting a leg of lamb into its parts, from the most highly treasured, neatly cubed pieces for shish kebab to the fattier but still tender parts for grinding into sausage. A sidebar of the ritual was putting the bone and all the gristly bits into a pot, covering them with water, and gently simmering them into a broth for fasoulia. Even though the dish was a by-product of making shish kebab, it enjoyed a humble stature on our dinner table. These days when I desire a taste of lamb home cooking and am not deconstructing a leg of lamb, I use a bit of purchased ground lamb for meatballs. The green beans are key here, and though I usually turn up my nose at frozen vegetables, I make an exception for fasoulia, so that it can be enjoyed throughout the year. I find this soup-stew doesn’t need anything in the way of a side dish. A slice of bread, a spoon, and family company suffice, but Armenians would include pilaf on the side.

This is how my mother cooks green beans. They’re so good and so simple that right from the start we made them our Tuesday vegetable of the day at the restaurant.

This recipe from our Rochester restaurant brings together the lively flavors of fresh garlic and ginger. It makes for a refreshin’ salad that goes with all sorts of grilled and roasted meats and poultry.