Beans and Beans and Beans and Beans!

I have beans.  Lots of beans.  Perhaps I planted too many.  LOL

I didn't think, at the time, it was too many.  One packet of Annie's Rainbow Beans from here, plus two poles' worth of Kentucky Wonder pole beans (also ordered from Annie's).  It didn't seem like too many in the garden:  the equivalent of two rows in the southwest quadrant.

But, man, have I got beans!!  And the pole beans have only started having ripe beans on the vines today!

Which is a way of saying, I guess, that Annie's has great seeds that germinate and grow well, and mature into prolific plants.

Here is a picture of what I picked on Thursday; which is pretty representative of what I've been harvesting every other (or sometimes, every third) day for the past two weeks.

At first, I was canning the beans in quart and pint jars.  But my cellar is rapidly filling, and my old standby favorite Kentucky Wonder beans are barely getting started.  I want to leave some jars and shelf space for those too. So this weekend, I switched to blanching and freezing the rainbow blend beans whole.

We've been experimenting with new recipes for fresh green beans (hence my decision to freeze a quantity as whole beans). So far, two recipes really stand out as winners that we will make again and again.

They are  this and this other one .  We've tried both recipes with 'normal' green beans, with the purple beans, the wax beans, the dragon's tongue beans, and with a mix of all four.  Doesn't seem to matter which variety of bean I use, they all come out tasty with either recipe, and it's a break from the typical steamed-or-boiled-green-beans-with-butter-on-top.

This is our first year ever growing, or eating, the dragon's tongue bean.  It is a wider, flatter podded type of bean than your typical green or wax bean, but just as tasty.  Don't be afraid of the name, there is nothing hot or spicy about this bean (unless you add seasonings to make it that way.)

We had guests the first day I cooked these beans up, and upon hearing the name 'dragon's tongue', one young guest asked "they aren't hot--like fire--are they?"  :0)

Not hot, just pretty, and pretty tasty too.  The purple streaks do turn to the same color as the cream/white background when the beans are heated.