Garden fresh string beans and tomatoes
A low carb side dish or meatless meal
It’s harvest time for fresh tomatoes and we are making the most of them. This low carb side dish of string beans and tomatoes brings the freshness of the garden to your dinner plate in a delicious flavorful sauté.
Beautiful fresh vegetables
The produce departments and farmer’s markets are abundant with beautiful bright fresh vegetables this time of year. I think we often overlook the beauty of a display of fruits and vegetables. We just want to get what we need and move on.
From time to time I step back and look at the refrigerated section where they have the unwrapped fresh produce, the case with the mist. It’s a spectacular burst of colors. The leafy vegetables come in countless shades of green and red and purple swirled with white! There are so many different shapes, sizes and colors. The radishes, scallions, celery and orange carrots with their feathery stems are in there. And everything is glittering with dew drops from the mist. It’s a “stop and smell the roses” moment for me.
Some stores pay more attention to the appearance of their produce department than others. I have shopped in produce departments where the fruits and vegetables are displayed in bold and beautiful collections of color, all so perfectly lined up that it looks like it should be a painting. You can see and even smell the freshness. There is a kind of energy or essence in freshly picked fruits and vegetables that translates to the senses.
Lots of people think that fresh produce always costs more than canned or frozen produce. That’s not true. Canned and frozen aren’t cheap these days. If fresh produce is more expensive it is usually because we buy more than we are are going to use. We have a post about buying fresh produce suggesting what to look for and how to get the most for your money What Your Meat and Potatoes are Telling You.
A tasty vegetable sauté
String beans are beautiful, crisp and abundant during our summer growing season and I am always looking for new ways to use them. One of the great things about string beans is they are easy to pair with other flavors. In this recipe we are using them with fresh ripe garden tomatoes. We are going to retain their fresh taste by blanching them before we sauté.
This garden fresh sauté is all vegetable no filler. We start with olive oil and sauté onion and garlic till golden brown. Then the stars of the show, our string beans and tomatoes are added. This low carb vegetable medley is a delicious and nutritious side dish, but has enough flavor to carry it’s own as a meatless main dish too.
An extra step saves time
It always amazes me how long it takes to cook a string bean. The cooking time can be a challenge in a sauté. They either brown up before they are tender or you have to cover the skillet and steam them. We are going to take another approach.
We are going to blanch the green beans before we sauté. Are you familiar with blanching? String beans are commonly blanched because it brings out the bright green color. Many recipes call for green beans to be crisp tender and blanching is the perfect way to achieve that. In this recipe, the blanched beans will finish cooking in the sauté.
We are going to use a couple of ripe round garden tomatoes. If I am cooking with tomatoes I usually use plum tomatoes, but not in this recipe. There are so many gorgeous full sized tomatoes available now and I want to use them in as many dishes as I can. We are going to blanch our tomatoes with the green beans so we can peel the skins off easily.
Here’s what YOU WILL NEED:
| 3/4 pound fresh string beans |
| 2 whole tomatoes |
| 1 small onion |
| 2 cloves of garlic |
| 1 teaspoon salt |
This is WHAT TO DO:
Prepare the ingredients
String beans
Trim the stem end from your string beans. There is no need to cut the bottom off unless it has been broken off already and is now a dried end. Kitchen shears are perfect for trimming beans. You can snap the top off easily if they are fresh but I sometimes lose some of the bean if I do. The kitchen shears let me trim the end close to the stem. If you don’t want to keep them long, you can snap or cut them into sections.
It’s easy to find out how fresh a green bean is. Just bend it a bit. If it’s rubbery enough to bend easily it isn’t fresh. A fresh green bean will break before it bends. You don’t have to actually break it to test for freshness, you will feel that it’s not supple enough to bend when you try to.
Tomato
We are going to blanch our tomatoes to peel them, so we need to prepare them for that.
Cut into the top of each of the tomatoes with a paring knife and remove the stem and core. Then cut an “X” on the bottom of the tomato. Just pierce through the skin. You don’t need to cut into the tomato.
Onion
Slice the onion into strips. We have some pictures showing the “how to” of cutting onions in Slice Dice Mince and Chop and About Onions.
Garlic
Finely mince 2 cloves of garlic.
You can also use the jarred minced or chopped garlic. The garlic is used to add some flavor but It isn’t a featured ingredient in this recipe, so substituting fresh with pre-chopped is fine. If you are using pre-minced garlic make sure to use the equivalent amount stated on the label.
Not sure what a clove is? We have an ingredient tidbit about using garlic All About Garlic.
So here are our vegetables ready to go
The stem ends have been trimmed from the string beans using kitchen shears
The onion is sliced
The garlic is minced
The tomatoes are cored and we cut an “X” on the bottom
Time to blanch
We are going to blanch the green beans and the tomatoes for a couple of reasons.
The beans will parboil. Parboil is a term used in cooking which means to partially cook an ingredient in boiling water. Parboiling the beans will reduce the amount of time it will take to sauté them in the skillet and because of that they will have a fresher taste. Also, we can control the crispness/tenderness easier. If you like your string beans very crisp you may consider them done to your liking after you have blanched them. The string beans are the last ingredient to be added so leave them in the skillet just long enough to warm them up and meld the flavors.
We are going to blanch the tomatoes in the same pot as our beans. That’s going to make an easy task of peeling them. You will see how that works in this recipe but if you want to know more about peeling tomatoes to make a sauce check out Peeling Fresh Tomatoes.
Get ready
Put a pot of water on the stove to boil. The pot should be big and deep enough so you can fit the 2 tomatoes in it with enough room to float in the water without pressing against the sides or bottom. The green beans will float to the top and don’t need a lot of room. Covering the pan makes it quicker to bring the water to a boil but we don’t use the cover to blanch.
Have a wide bottomed bowl or baking dish close by the pot to scoop the beans and tomatoes into when they are ready to come out.
You will need a kitchen tool of some sort to scoop your vegetables out. I have a spoon called a “spider” shown in this picture. The spoon end is a metal mesh. It’s great for this. But a slotted spoon or a small strainer will work too.
When the water is boiling
Bring the water to a boil on medium high heat then add the string beans. You don’t need a full rolling boil that is climbing up the sides of the pot to blanch. You are better off to keep the boil less turbulent. But we do want a rapid boil. We want these vegetables to cook quickly, not simmer. Keep the water bubbling.
You can salt the water a little before you add the vegetables but it is not necessary.
Add the vegetables
Add the string beans to the boiling water first. They are going to take about 5 minutes to parboil. The tomatoes don’t need that long.
After the beans have been boiling for 3 minutes, add the tomatoes to the boiling water. The reason we are blanching the tomatoes isn’t to cook them, it’s to peel the skin off easily. Without this step, it is very difficult to get the skin off a tomato without losing some of the meat and juice. And this way is quicker also.
Our green beans have boiled for about 3 minutes and the tomatoes have been added to the pot.
Boil until the tomatoes skins burst open and start peeling away from the meat.
Scoop the string beans and tomatoes out
Leave the tomatoes and beans in the water until the tomato skins start to peel away from the meat. When that happens scoop the tomatoes and the beans out of the water and into the bowl.
Leave them to cool.
And here they are. Our tomatoes and string beans have been blanched and are cooling.
You can see how the skin of the tomatoes have peeled away from the meat
NOTE: Sometimes when a recipe calls for you to blanch an ingredient you will be instructed to to scoop the vegetables into ice water “usually referred to as plunging them into ice water”, to stop them from continuing to cook. That’s called “shocking” it. So it would read like this: you plunge your beans in ice water to shock them. Pretty passive aggressive terminology isn’t it? We don’t need to do that for this recipe. It doesn’t matter if the beans or the tomato cook slightly as they cool off.
Remove the skin and seeds from each of the tomatoes
When the tomatoes have cooled enough for you to handle, cut the tomato in half across the middle. The skin will just slide off. Remove most of the seeds and the gel around them with a spoon. If they are not coming out easily, cut each half section in half again and scrape the seeds and membrane off with the spoon or a knife. We are only using the red meat of the tomatoes.
Put the peeled and seeded tomatoes in a bowl and crush them by hand. You will get plenty of juice as you squeeze them. We are going to use that juice. You will have chunks of tomato after you have crushed them. That’s the way we want them.
We have removed the skins and seeds which are in the bowl on the upper right side of the picture
The tomatoes have been crushed by hand.
Time to sauté
Sauté the onion and garlic till lightly browned
Put enough olive oil in a skillet to cover the bottom then add the onion and garlic. Cook on medium high heat. Stir frequently. Stay at the stove. This isn’t going to take long to cook.
Sauté until lightly browned.
Add sliced onion and minced garlic to the olive oil in the skillet
The onions and garlic have been lightly browned
Add the tomatoes and salt, stir and cook
Let the tomatoes cook for about 5 minutes. Then add the string beans.
Add the tomatoes and salt. Cook for 5 minutes. Stir frequently.
Add the beans
Leave the string beans in the tomato sauce for at least a couple of minutes to meld the flavors and warm them up. How long you cook the string beans in the sauce depends on how crisp or tender you like them. When beans are done to your liking remove the skillet from the heat.
Add the beans. Cook to your liking.
Done
Here’s our string bean and tomato sauté ready to serve.
String Beans and Tomatoes Served
STRING BEANS AND TOMATOES
Ingredients
- ¾ pound string beans
- 2 tomatoes
- 1 small yellow onion
- 2 cloves garlic
- 1 teaspoon salt
Instructions
Prepare ingredients
- Trim the string beans
- Core the tomatoes and slice an "X" on the bottom
- Mince the 2 cloves of garlic (or use equivalent of jarred garlic)
- Slice the onion
Blanch the beans and tomatoes
- Bring a large pot of water to a boil on medium high heat. Put the trimmed beans into the pot to parboil/blanch. After 3 minutes add the cored tomatoes to the boiling water. Leave the tomatoes in until the skins start peeling off then remove the beans and the tomatoes from the water and put them in a bowl to cool.
- When tomatoes are cool peel the skin off the tomatoes, remove the seeds and crush them by hand. Save all the juice.
Sauté
- Use a 10 or 12 inch skillet on medium high heat. Add enough olive oil to cover the bottom the skillet.
- Add the onion and garlic to the oil and sauté until they are lightly browned.,
- Add the crushed tomato and salt to the skillet and stir. Let the tomato cook in the skillet for about 5 minutes.
- Add the string beans and saute until the beans are cooked to your liking.
- Serve