On a recent trip to Surfas I purchased a bag of "Tongue of Fire" beans. These are a type of cranberry bean, or as they are known in Italian, borlotti beans. The beans are white, with swirls of red and they are very pretty. Despite the name, they are not spicy, which is kind of disappointing, but the beauty of beans is that you can MAKE them spicy if you want to.
The beans themselves have a nutty flavor, which is really good. I'm not so much of a bean fan, but I preferred these to other types of beans I have had. Cranberry beans grow fresh in the summer, i.e., now and are available dried throughout the rest of the year.
It just so happened that there was a recipe for a halibut dish utilizing cranberry beans in the September issue of Food and Wine. It's a pan-roasted halibut with the lemon butter sauce.
Recipe and wine pairing suggestions can be found HERE.
Things I would do differently next time are:
1. Soak the beans before cooking. They took forever to cook.
2. Turn up the heat a little when reducing the wine. That also took forever.
Other than the unanticipated length of time it took, the recipe came out great. The fish was really easy to do once the sauce was made and the the bean salad turned out nicely. Which is good--anything to get me to eat my vegetables! I think the sauce really makes it. The lemon provides some zest and the white wine provides that rich alcohol flavor that always tastes so good in a sauce.
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Quit making me hungry.
By the way, I have a coffee post coming up for you. Maybe sometime next week ...
Garrett: Thanks! I'm trying to improve on my picture taking. I don't have a lot of beautiful settings in my apartment so my pix are not as fancy as some people's. But I'm working on it!