Another cookbook meal! This time, I made potato pancakes, again from Tessa Kiros’ Falling Cloudberries, and I served them with ‘Dramatically Seared Green Beans’, from Vegetarian Times (and look, here’s the recipe!). I carefully followed the potato pancake recipe (you fold in beaten egg whites, which keep them really soft and light), but I did cut the amount of (peanut) oil for the green beans — only 1.5T instead of the called-for 2T. They’re really good — they have just a little heat from the red pepper flakes — but Rob and I agreed that they would be way too oily if I’d stuck to the recipe.
We had to eat on the deck (which — we have a non-rotting deck now! with furniture!), because the green beans produced a lot of smoke. I thought peanut oil had a fairly high smoke point, but maybe not this particular stuff. At any rate, I still preferred it to canola oil, which always has that heavy ‘fried’ taste to me. The green beans were grown locally (though not by me), and the potatoes came from my parents’ garden. And the chives in the sour cream came from our ‘weedy’ patch!
