Fresh Green Beans with Fingerling Potatoes

Meatless meal or add protein.

Today I visited Wright's Berry Farm hoping to find concord grapes to make grape jelly. There were none but I did find my first really good looking fresh local green beans and didn't pass them up!! Here it is a couple of days before the start of September and our weather has been so strange as to not have found great green beans until today. Unheard of in my memory.

It looks like I will not be making grape jelly either as I telephoned Joe Engelbrecht's Orchard today as he thought last year his vines would produce this year but it has not worked out either. We have not had a really good gardening summer here in the tri-state area.

Green beans are a major yes on the diet I have begun today so I am cooking them in chicken stock with onions, carrots, and a few fingerling potatoes for Brian, my husband who loves them!! I will abstain from the potatoes.

Basically I have washed and broken the beans and added them along with the other vegetables to a kettle with chicken stock made last week. They will simmer the rest of this afternoon and be just right along side a slice of ham steak and sliced tomatoes and cottage cheese for dinner or I will have as is. 

Brian calls this a down home supper and will be really happy when I set a plate before him!!

Here are my ingredients:

2 pounds fresh green beans, washed and broken
1 onion diced
6 fingerling potatoes washed
4 carrots peeled and cut into short sticks
1 ham hock

2 quarts chicken stock
salt and pepper to taste

Simmer all of these ingredients together in a large covered kettle for 1 1/2 to 2 hours over low heat serve as a one pot meatless meal or add whatever else you would like to serve.

I made up a large dish of diced melon and that will serve as desert should anyone care for some and there are homemade cookies in the cookie jar.

I am calling this meal done.