What amounts to a hill of beans

Scarlet runner beans, in varying stages of my impatience

Jason is coming over again tonight for Project Runway Night (followed by Top Design), and is gorgeous to be bringing a barbecue chicken pizza from Blind Onion. I’m making some salad of sorts from my garden’s bounty. It will likely prominently feature the tomato. I’m also jonesing for some spaghetti margherita, so we’ll see if one pizza is enough.

My Scarlet Runner beans (Phaseolus coccineus, Fabaceae) are getting ripe. I picked a handful of them a couple weeks ago, too early, way before their pods dried and split. Shelling beans require so much of my patience! But my patience will be rewarded when I’m sitting in front of the cassoulette I’m planning this weekend.

These are the stuff of fairy tales. Immense beans – fuchsia, lilac and indigo – borne of papilionaceous, cadmium-red flowers on indeterminate vines. I wonder what Jack would trade for a sack of these?

Lately I’m really turned on by the idea of making elegant single servings of labor-intensive and/or peasant foods. I have a plan to make small plates of doro wat with braised pheasant or quail legs and Janelle’s silkie bantam eggs. This weekend I am making single-serving cassoulet (“cassoulette” means “small cassoulet”): wee pancetta-lined ramekins of runner beans with shredded duck confit, lamb sausage, and a brunoise of lardons. They will be miniature cassoulets made with psychedelic beans and duck fat roux. My cassoulettes will be worth the trouble of slaying a giant.