Dee Randall > wrote:

: "Dave Smith" > wrote in message
:> Green Beans. I used to like green beans. We grew them in our back yard
:> and
:> they were great. My mother would freeze the excess and we had enough
:> frozen
:> green beans to get us through the winter, and they were good even after
:> freezing. We buy beans from local vegetable stands in season, but even
:> those are not as good as the beans I remember from years gone by. And the
:> beans in the grocery store... forget it... they are crap.
:>
:>
: I agree -- Now I only buy the frozen baby (small) ones at Costco or BJ's. I
: bought some expensive fresh ones (baby, all packed up in straight little
: rows) and they were good the first time - bought them 3 times more and they
: were old and awful. So it's only frozen ones for me from now on. No matter
: how good fresh ones look at the market, I don't bother. Even at the chinese
: restaurants, their fresh green beans are tough and stringy and mostly
: tasteless anymore.

A friend gave me a couple of pounds of purple beans
grown by his brother. These are the beans that are purple
when raw but lose the purple during cooking so that they look
like cooked green beans. I thought I was getting one of these
vegetables bred for its looks, which is usually a taste disaster,
but these proved to be the best 'green' beans I've had in years,
crisp, stringless, lively taste: my husband gobbled them up
as soon as I got them out of the wok, saving them from the
overcooking I've had to do to get him to eat green beans
in recent years
--thelma
: Dee Dee