Do a runner beans

Runner beans and spicy tomato sauce / a coconut raita / on gardens

Ingredients

Runner beans and spicy tomato sauce
500 g runner beans
500 g fresh cherry tomatoes
1 T cooking oil
2 red onions
3 cloves garlic
1 t coriander seeds
1 t caraway seeds
1-2 dried chillies (to taste, seeds removed)
3 T tomato paste
olive oil and flat parsley (to serve)

Coconut and courgette raita
250 g full fat coconut yoghurt
1 yellow courgette
1 clove garlic
squeeze lemon juice
salt and pepper (to taste)

Method

1. For the beans: Start by placing the cherry tomatoes under the grill in the oven until they are blackened on the outside (around 10 minutes). Remove, allow to cool, slip the skins off.

2. Meanwhile, slice onions and cook with oil in a frying pan on a medium heat until well browned, around 10 minutes.

3. Top and tail the beans, keeping them whole if preferred or slicing into pieces. Then cook in a saucepan of boiling, salted water, around 5 minutes, until cooked. It is better to err on the side of a little under-cooked as they will continue to cook in the sauce.

4. Using a mortar and pestle, grind spices and chillies. Add to onions, along with chopped garlic. Cook a further minute.

5. Add tomatoes, tomato paste and onion mix into a blender and blend for 30 seconds, until combined. It should retain some texture. Place back in the frying pan and reheat until sauce is hot. Then add the beans. Stir well and allow to cook for a few additional minutes until ready to serve. Season to taste.

6. For the raita: Grate the yellow courgette and add to the coconut yoghurt, along with microplaned garlic clove and lemon juice and salt and pepper to taste.

7. To serve: plate the beans or serve in the frying pan, with raita on the side. Drizzle over olive oil and a sprinkling of flat parsley.

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The garden in your head

There’s this book I’ve read a dozen times. A book I’ve recommended to people with no interest in gardening, or the outdoors, for its self-effacing humour, for the way it speaks to some primeval, romantic urge in all of us to escape back to the land. A man quits a lucrative job in advertising in London to buy a tumble-down cottage on a mountaintop in Wales and start a garden. He moves there with his family and writes a book about his madcap (mis)adventures. The opening line of that book has stuck with me since I first read it ten years ago. The Garden in The Clouds begins with the lines: “Everyone has a garden in their head”. Apparently a trick of the trade of hypnotists, who ask their patients to imagine a garden as a device to get them to be open, relaxed and receptive to what is to follow.

Is it true that everyone has a garden in their head? I fear I would be a disaster for the hypnotist. My problem is the use of the singular. I have so many gardens in my head. How could I choose only one? There was the backyard of the house that I grew up in. A dry summer lawn full of prickles (Onehunga Prickle Weed?), that would dig its hard hooks into your bare feet and hold on for dear life. But then there were also fruit trees, a giant cherry tree, a vegetable patch, a playhouse painted with murals by one child after another, a giant gum tree on the back border that grew so large it twisted its roots through the neighbour’s pipes and had to be cut down and turned into firewood and sawdust. The backyard was divided into an upper terrace and a lower one by a sharp dip, and on that dividing line, my mother aspired to grow a row of apple trees, perhaps with the idea of creating a shady, secret garden in the back, a row of white blossoms in spring. But those scrawny trees refused to amount to anything, the upper level too dry, losing any moisture to the boggier level below. There was a herb garden where we were sent out to pick lettuce and herbs for the salad, first curly parsley and chives, later coriander and basil.

There were my Aunt’s gardens. The first one I remember had grapevines strung over trellising and an apricot tree in the driveway. We came home from holiday one year to find the apricots still on the tree, albeit past their best, picked-over by birds. Climbing the branches, we ate the half-dried apricots one after another, tossing down the ones the birds had got to. Gorging on apricots until we couldn’t eat any more. Those were the best apricots I had ever eaten. That is where I trace my love of apricot jam on scones and sour dried apricots in morning granola. I can’t be sure, but I remember a giant vegetable patch, a tall frame for things to climb. Tomatoes and beans, surely beans. The characteristic scarlet red and white flowers. Then my Aunt and Uncle moved to a ramshackle, and historic farmhouse in the country, Lambhill, which has an entire blog devoted to it (I fear, however, that the photos do not entirely do the garden justice, it would be hard for any photos to do so).

All of the gardens in my head are tied to a person, a place, specific memories, like the first time I pricked myself with a rose bush, learning how to break off one of the thorns, lick it and stick it on my nose to turn into a triceratops; or lifting the netting in my grandfather’s garden in Whangamata to pick and eat the tiny, sweet strawberries; or the first garden I took responsibility for myself, in the shadow of the hills in Wellington, on a dark hillside, planting lavender bushes around the clothesline so the clothes would smell like lavender as they dried. Like my mother’s ill-fated apple trees, the lavender clung to life in its damp shady spot, slowly being outgrown by ferns, and it rained so often we rarely hung our clothes out to dry anyway.

A few months ago we bought a garden, with an old house attached. The house is rundown and we’re renovating, with little hope of moving in any time soon. Both the front and back gardens are currently filled with rubble, bricks that we want to try and chip mortar off to reuse, old wood and nails, the old window-frame with the tar edges that have melted in the heat and dripped all over the ground. But underneath all of that there is, nonetheless, a garden. And I am already dreaming about what it will be. Not a cottage on a Welsh mountain top or a prickle-filled back lawn, or a New Zealand colonial farmhouse, but a Dutch row-house with a modest urban garden that nevertheless has so much potential. And once the garden begins to take shape, maybe next year, I hope to plant a vegetable patch with a central teepee of beans. They seem to be so quintessentially of the vegetable garden. Adding height and colour and their gracious long beans for picking in the early morning.

In the meantime, I’m making do with beans from the vegetable box. More than making do. Look at these beautiful, tender violet beans, which magically turn green when cooked; the tougher, more leathery, green runner beans, which I cooked first as they took longer.

This week’s recipe comes from the idea of a spicy, roasted tomato sauce like what I make for a shakshuka. Eat the sauce spooned over beans. Eat them hot or cold. Make the raita as well if you like. It’s not compulsory but it is delicious. If summer is not finding new ways to cook beans and tomatoes and courgettes, I do not know what is. Perhaps one day, mine will come straight from the garden.

Do you have a garden in your head?

Amelia.