Green Bean Salad: Another Ridiculously Easy Side Dish

Here is the first new dish for Cookbook Exploitation Month! I hope you enjoy it.

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This is a healthy and really easy salad that you can whip up in 15 minutes. It has just a few easy-to-find ingredients, yet they combine to make an exotic taste sensation unlike anything I've ever had before.

I dug this recipe out of The Healthy Kitchen (by Andrew Weil and Rosie Daley) last weekend while I was rooting around for some new recipes to try for Cookbook Exploitation Month.

I thought this one was so good and so simple that I had to share it with my readers.
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Green Bean Salad
(from The Healthy Kitchen: Recipes for a Better Body, Life, and Spiritby Andrew Weil and Rosie Daley)

1 pound fresh green beans
2-3 Tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
2 cloves garlic, minced or pressed
2 bay leaves
A dash of salt
1 lemon

Trim the ends off of the beans and drop them into rapidly boiling water. Cook until they are still crunchy, for 5 minutes only, do not overcook.

Drain the beans and cool them with cold water to stop them from cooking further. Then dry the beans off and toss them in a bowl with the olive oil, garlic, bay leaves and salt.

Use a vegetable peeler to remove 4 strips of yellow zest from the outside of the lemon. See the picture below:

Be careful to remove just the yellow outermost layer of the rind, leaving the more bitter-tasting white part of the rind alone.

Add these to the beans, toss well, and let the salad stand at room temperature for several hours until the flavors merge.

Remove the bay leaves, toss well, and serve.
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Let me share a quick note about the cookbook that this recipe came from. For some reason, maybe because of the picture on the cover, we've taking to calling it "Andrew and His Concubine."

But all kidding aside, this cookbook is quite useful. It contains exceptionally helpful information about nutrition from Andrew Weil--I've found his commentary on organic produce and thoughts on why to avoid milk quite interesting. The recipes and cooking tips come from Rosie Daley, who was once Oprah Winfrey's personal chef.

At times, Rosie's recipes can get a bit too complex for Casual Kitchen's taste (this green bean salad is a happy exception), so I haven't delved into the cookbook as much as I would like to just yet. But if you are interested in learning about Andrew Weil's compelling philosophy of nutrition while also getting a really eclectic collection of recipes, I'd recommend this cookbook. Follow the link below and let me know what you think!