Courgette Green Bean Salad
When I’m out in the garden I’m always amazed at the tenacity of life. Even when I pay no attention at all to what’s happening, green things thrive. Often I feel like they do better when I intervene less. Sadly, it’s not the same case with green things and my fridge. Once you have green things in your fridge you have to pay attention to them because they have a persistently annoying habit of going bad before you’re ready to use them.
Just today I threw some okra in the food waste bin because it was decisively past its best self and there was no way to save it. I would say that is the exception though. In the last year I’ve become much better at catching things just before they turn the corner into unsalvageable. I’ll give you my secret. Always have a cheese with a long use by date in your fridge. For us that means feta. We generally have parmesan all the time too but for cases like this where you need to jazz up the vegetables you’ve been ignoring for almost too long I’ve found that cheese brings it back to life.
Not just that cheese brings it back to life but that the idea of the cheese makes the vegetables more palatable. I know I’m probably not supposed to admit that but it is absolutely the truth. My highest self bought those vegetables in the first place so I had the right intentions but then the self that lives in the actual world didn’t want to eat courgettes and wanted to eat chips instead. So, mentally, you just need to give the vegetables a little boost to get them past the chips in your head. Cheese. Lemon juice does it, too. Pine nuts. All of these things work and they are all at work in this salad.
Deb Perelman said that she spends an unhealthy amount of time debating whether salads need a recipe since they are usually just thrown together from a bunch of things. I totally see where she’s coming from because while this is titled Courgette Green Bean Salad, I’ve done the same thing to broccoli, cauliflower, carrots and cabbage. Not all at the same time but the same idea, making it more of a formula than a recipe, I suppose.
So this formula is to look in your fridge with an eye toward search and rescue. Find the green things that you don’t have a plan for, cut them up, put them in a hot pan to revive them and when they come out, dress them up in the things that excite you. Everyone gets by with a little help from their friends and, in the end, that food is always better in your body than the bin.
