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Sauteed Green Beans with Bacon

Green Beans with Bacon

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Plain, steamed vegetables do not taste good.

I recently ordered sauteed spinach at a restaurant, with no butter, please.

Guess what they brought me: steamed spinach without a hint of oil, seasonings or flavors of any kind.

Guess how it tasted: absolutely terrible!

Note: In my experience, the chef at any decent restaurant will know how to prepare flavorful vegetables without butter.  But just in case, I often clarify with the server that I can have oil and seasonings.

At home, of course, it’s much easier to cook up flavorful veggies.

I love Nina Planck’s straightforward “dress it up nicely” protocol:

Every vegetable should be properly dressed, and to me that means the right fat, a little salt, and perhaps one flavor, such as fresh herbs or good cheese.  [Real Food, p.159]

I try to keep her rule of thumb in mind, keeping my vegetable preparation as simple as possible and using quality fats and good sea salt.

One of my family’s favorite vegetable + fat + salt combinations is Sauteed Green Beans with Bacon.  Simple to prepare, this is a delicious way to eat your green beans!

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Sauteed Green Beans with Bacon

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  • Author: Yankee Homestead

Ingredients

  • Bacon
  • Bacon drippings
  • Green beans
  • Unrefined Sea Salt

Instructions

  1. Cook bacon, reserving the drippings in a bowl. (This step can be done ahead of time).
  2. Heat skillet and add bacon drippings.
  3. Add green beans and saute until you consider them “done.”
  4. At the very end, crumble (or snip with kitchen shears) a few pieces of bacon over the beans and mix to combine.
  5. Season with salt, to taste.
  6. Serve!

Notes

1. I love Wegmans Cleaned & Cut French Green Beans (in the produce section).

2. Cooking the full bag of green beans (pictured above) requires two batches, or two skillets going at the same time. Or perhaps one giant skillet!

3. Instead of bacon drippings, you could use lard or sausage drippings. (And instead of crumbling bacon over the beans, you could crumble sausage. I’ve done this and it’s good!).

4. We almost always have bacon or sausage in the house, for breakfast purposes. So whenever I cook those breakfast meats, I reserve the drippings for future use. Just this morning I fried up some eggs in bacon drippings!

5. A few tips for saving bacon or sausage drippings (in case you’ve never done it before):

–Wait for the drippings to cool slightly, to reduce your risk of getting burned.
–Pour them into a bowl. As they cool, they’ll solidify and turn white, resembling lard.
–Save in the fridge.
–When needed, scoop out with a spoon.

6. Obviously, you could use raw bacon or sausage, cooking it to the skillet first. Reserve, then add to sauteed beans.

 

 

 

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Let's get real! I’m Kathleen Henderson, your Natural Living Mentor. I’m on a mission to help families see the joy in real food, while finding natural remedies and creating a nontoxic home. Learn more about my story >>

6 Comments

  1. Cherith Kennedy on 12/19/2012 at 2:41 pm

    mmmmmm, I will have to make these for us!

  2. Nancy @ Barry-Jansson & Associates on 12/25/2012 at 2:05 am

    Mmmmm….looks very good. Looking forward to trying this!

    (I found my way to the site by your Herbamare post – plan to do that, too! I just started eating Paleo in May ’12 and LOVE it.)

    Another good one with green beans:
    Tossed Sauteed Onions and Green Beans with Fresh Tomatoes (with or without meat)

    1. Place your frozen beans in a container with room-temp water to thaw.

    2. Slice up a whole white/yellow onion, and saute slices of a whole onion in coconut oil and spices (Herbamare and Paprika work well). When they are mostly done, I move them to the outside of the pan. Drain the beans (I use the drained water to water my house or yard plants).

    3. If I have meat to cook, this is when I place it in the center of the pan to cook (chicken, turkey, bacon, fish, etc.). If you need to add a little more coconut oil and spices, do so. When meat is done, remove to cool. If I had no meat, I’d jump to the next step.

    4. Drop the thawed and drained green beans into the pan and toss the thawed green beans in the hot juices of the meat, onions, and spices. Then, turn off the heat and cover the pan. The beans will steam in the moisture.

    5. Cut a tomato into wedges or small pieces.

    6. Plate the meat. Toss the onions and beans, then portion it out onto each plate, place fresh tomato on top. (It’s beautiful, by the way!)

    I stumbled on this when I only had onions, tomatoes and beans on hand. This is perfect in summer or winter – and in the summer, it’s delicious with cold homemade lemonade and berries/cherries.

    Just realizing the beans with bacon, onions and tomato would be AWESOME, too! 😀

    Best regards,
    Nancy

    • Yankee Homestead on 12/25/2012 at 4:00 pm

      Thanks for stopping by, and for sharing this recipe!

  3. Courtney D on 01/09/2013 at 11:18 pm

    just made these- with bacon drippings- and i didn’t have ‘french cut’–so, what advice do you have: i put bacon drippings in a skillet, added some water-added beans-and cooked them, for what seemed like forever- and i didn’t get them to a cooked crispness. do you cover them? help, please– the flavor was fabulous, but i ended up popping them in the microwave (ugh!) for 2 minutes and then they were perfect. suggestions? love your recipes!

    • Yankee Homestead on 01/10/2013 at 12:23 pm

      Hmmm. Why the water? I use several heaping spoonfuls of the bacon drippings and saute until brown and very soft, because I do not like crunchy green beans. If I wanted them to be more crisp, I would shorten the cooking time. And I often do cover them, because it seems to speed the cooking time (and prevents splatters).

      Does this help!? Keep me posted…

      • Courtney D on 01/10/2013 at 2:09 pm

        I must have gone too conservative with the bacon drippings. I used 1 1/2 t, probably. too few by the sounds of it–and yes- I’ll cover it next time. i added water b/c they just weren’t cooking- thanks!

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