Heirloom veggies generally spark questions with their intriguing shapes and colors. This week, for example, our CSA customers will receive a beautiful and different ‘green’ bean with the outstanding flavor heirlooms are renowned for.
If you aren’t a CSA customer, but live in the Athens area, you can order some fresh-picked from our Farm Store (just click on the link at the top of the page.) We’ll harvest them just for you and deliver them to a local store for your pickup. Check it out!
Called Dragon Tongue Bush Beans (or Dragon Tongue Langerie), these beans have flat, edible pods and a creamy white base color with variegated stripes of dark purple. One of our favorites for garden-grazing as we harvest. (There are perks to gardening!)
As with most heirlooms, you don’t need to feel obligated to find some fancy recipe for them. Just use your own favorite green bean recipe. They will make your dish something extra special. In fact, we had these for dinner last night, cooked gently with fresh new potatoes and flavored with spring onions and green garlic. Really good, I must say, although they lose the beautiful colors when you cook them.
If you want to try something new to showcase the fresh, crisp flavor, feel free to add them to a raw veggie platter along with the carrot sticks and red peppers or simply snap them into short, happy pieces and toss them into a favorite salad. I’m thinking they would make excellent refrigerator pickles, as well.
I found several great sounding recipes on the Gardenerd website you might want to check out (Just click HERE.). I’ll be trying the Summer Bean Salad in the next few days.
We often provide recipes for CSA and market customers and we label most of the veggies just so you will have the right words to do a quick internet search for more information and recipes.
If you find – or create – an especially good method for fixing any of our fresh veggies, we hope you’ll share the tips! We’d love to try it your way!
But the most important thing is not to avoid those unique and different heirlooms. You’d miss out on so much great eating!
