Coconut & Lime

Ingredients:
1 lb green beans (or 1/2 green 1/2 wax beans), blanched*
8 oz sliced mushrooms
3/4 cup stock (chicken, vegetable or shrimp)
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 inch knob ginger, minced
1 shallot, minced
2 tablespoons rice wine
2 tablespoons black sesame oil
1 tablespoon cornstarch
1 tablespoon canola oil
panko

Directions:
Heat the oils in a large saucepan. Saute the garlic, shallot and ginger until just fragrant. Add the mushrooms and saute until soft. Meanwhile, whisk together the cornstarch, broth and rice wine. Pour over the mushrooms and bring to a boil. Allow it to reduce by half, about 20 minutes. Remove from heat and add the beans. Stir to evenly distribute the beans and mushrooms then pour into a 8 cup casserole dish. Sprinkle with panko. Bake for about 10 minutes at 350 or until it is bubbly and golden. Allow to sit for 5 minutes before serving.

*Cook in boiling water about a minute until they turn bright green, then immediately dunk into a large bowl of ice water. Drain.

My thoughts:

When I read Blogher's call for green bean casserole recipes, I realized I have never actually had the infamous dish. Frankly, I've always looked at the holiday time ads featuring recipes for condensed soup based dishes topped with canned (!) onions with abject horror. I understand that for a lot of green bean casserole eating Americans it is eaten more out of nostalgia than anything else, but as someone who did not grow up with it, I have no urge to start eating something that doesn't include a single ingredient I would ever normally eat. But I love a cooking challenge so I decided to make a green bean casserole that I would actually enjoy. Since we had had picked up some green and wax beans at the farmers market and were making ginger-scallion pork burgers for dinner yesterday seemed like a good time to experiment. To highlight the flavors of the burgers I started with a nontraditional ingredient (ginger) but kept some of what seems to be the key ingredients of a more traditional green bean casserole- mushrooms (though freed from the muck of condensed soup, I used fresh), green beans (although I used fresh instead of canned and tossed in a handful of wax beans), and fried shallots ( or onions). Instead of the use of sherry I saw in many "upscale" GBC recipes, I used rice wine and eliminated the heavy, creamy sauce in favor for a lighter, fresher tasting stock. The result: a green bean casserole even I could enjoy.