Thelma Lubkin wrote:

> 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
>
>
Thelma, I grow these kind of beans. They are called *Royal Burgundy*
which is listed as a novelty bean by Stokes. It is a bush bean. IME,
being a bush bean it is not as proliferic as the pole beans but they
have a nice flavour and a built in timer. I use extras to make dilly beans.