Recipe of the Month: Thai Stir-Fry

Our "Provider" green beans, which were such a disappointment last year, are really living up to their name this time around. We've already harvested over three pounds of them from our eight square feet of plants, with more coming every day. So after a few rounds of green beans amandine and our favorite eggplant and string beans in garlic sauce, he decided it was time to branch out and look for some new green bean recipes. And since we've also planted Thai basil for the first time this year, he thought a Thai recipe would be a good choice.

He started out looking for recipes for pad prik king, a dish we've had in Thai restaurants before that contains both string beans and Thai basil. But all the recipes he found for that seemed rather complicated, so he tried just searching on these two ingredients, and he came across this Thai pork, basil, and green bean stir-fry. Naturally, he had to make some modifications to this; he replaced the pork with pan-fried tofu cubes (prepared using his usual method for stir-fry) and toned down the spice by substituting one red jalapeno pepper for the two Thai bird chilis. He also left out the salt, thinking the soy sauce and fish sauce would make it quite salty enough, and added half a tablespoon of corn starch to thicken up the sauce. And he scaled up the green beans to 10 or 11 ounces rather than the 9 the recipe calls for, figuring a few extra veggies couldn't hurt.

The first thing we noticed when we tried the dish was that it was very salty—to the point that we both ended up taking more rice to dilute it a bit. It's hard to imagine how powerful the original recipe would have been with even more salt spread over a smaller volume of beans. Brian's best guess as to what happened is that adding the corn starch to the sauce made it stick to the veggies more, rather than running off into the bottom of the pan, so we ended up getting more of the salt even though he used less of it.

However, once we'd cut the veggies with more rice, the saltiness receded and the other flavors of the sauce came out a bit more. The Thai basil—which has a pungent, vaguely anise-like flavor almost nothing like regular basil—lent its distinctive savor, and the hot pepper and sugar gave it a background of spice and sweetness. Even the heavy salt didn't deter either of us from going back for seconds.

We both think with some further modifications to cut down the saltiness, this recipe should be a keeper. Next time he makes it, Brian plans to cut the soy sauce by at least half, making up the volume with either water or sherry. And if the Provider beans keep providing at their current rate, we shouldn't have to wait too long to try it.