As recipes go, this one is hardly a groundbreaker, but I saw Ina make it on Barefoot Contessa this week, and it involved two techniques I've seen several times now and was curious about.
One is using olive oil and butter for saute-ing. I forget exactly why, but it's something about olive oil for the high temperature, and butter for the flavor.
Two is blanching the vegetables. Tivo-deprived, my faulty memory vaguely filed away something Ina said about blanching would start to cook the beans and would bring out the color. (My son got a big kick out of filling a bowl with ice though!) The written recipe goes on to say that when you add the blanched beans to the sauteed shallots, just heat the beans. I think that's so they stay crisp, as I discovered with my slightly-soggy rendition.
I used fresh grean beans, not the haricots verts called for in the recipe. Ironically, we have a lot of haricots verts around here, frozen from TJs, and they're wonderful. Too wonderful. My family resoundly voted for the usual plain preparation of steaming frozen haricots verts (a staple in my emergency-dinner repertoire), over my blanching and sauteeing in olive oil and butter with shallots fresh green beans.
(As an aside, I do all my saute-ing in nonstick pans. All the cooking show chefs use stainless steel. Is this because there's a significant difference in the type of pan used for saute-ing? Or because they have sous-chef flunkies who do the cleanup for them? I am convinced on stainless steel for sauces, as Alton Brown said in his surprisingly informative show, despite the ultra-goofy format, "don't even think about using nonstick for a sauce!" Of course, I have yet to attempt a sauce. De-glazing, to me, is licking the sugar coating off a Krispy Kreme.)
I liked this, but I'll save it for next time we have critical mass of grownups.
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