The Good and the Not-So-Good

Pork with Mixed Green Beans. Another winner from Pefect Thai. This dish came out really good, though I made some changes to the recipe because of lack of ingredients. Chattanooga is not the mecca for grocery shopping, and I have a really hard time finding anything even remotely unique. Notice the recipe is titled "Mixed Green Beans", notice that my green beans look suspiciosly unmixed. The recipe called for Fine Green Beans, this was a new one for me. I searched online and can't figure out what a fine green bean is. If anyone knows, please comment. It also called for frozen fava beans. My grocery store has frozen black-eyed peas and frozen green peas, that is the extent of their frozen beans. And lastly, it called for string beans...ah something Bi-Lo and I had both heard of. So, what you are looking at is Pork with String Beans. Even with the missing assortment of beans, it was good.

The sauce is a simple one made from chicken stock, chili sauce, and peanut butter. It didn't specify hot chili sauce or sweet, so I used a combination of the two. It was very flavorable for being so simple. It was also served over crispy noodles. We watched a video from Thai Cooking Tonight to make sure we knew how to do it.

The next recipe that we tried, Pork with Vegetables, was not as successful. The sauce was basically a jar of black bean sauce. While, it was not bad, it didn't have the fresh flavors that I have come to associate with Thai cooking. It just really tasted of black bean sauce, and if you are not crazy about black bean sauce, you will not be crazy about this.

It doesn't look too bad, does it? But it was just a little too much black bean sauce for me.

On another note, we got our first CSA pick-up today. The was the farm's first attempt at running a CSA, and they picked a horrrible year to begin. First we had freakishly warm weather all winter, everything startd blooming and growing. Then we had 4 days of freezing temperatures in April, which killed alot of vegetation. Then finally once everything started growing again, we have a 5 week drought! So, needless to say, the pickins were slim. We got 2 beets, a handful of arugula, a handful of mustard greens, 1 turnip, 1 tomato, 1 yellow squash, 1 small bok choy, a head of garlic, and 2 daikon radish roots. I feel like one of the chefs on Top Chef and I have to do a quickfire challenge with these few, unrelated ingredients. Any ideas, anyone?