Beans and (Wild) Greens - Recipe

Gotta love free food! All over my (messy) garden are lots of edible plants that have self-sown or self-grown. Things I didn't plant that are otherwise known as "weeds," or some cases the progeny of things I did plant, a few generations back. If I were to wander around and see the edible foods out there right now that I did not plant (though in some cases there are others of the same species I DID plant this season), some of them would be: nasturtiums, dandelions, parsley, rainbow chard, perpetual spinach, green silverbeet, pumpkins, calendula, tomatoes, potatoes, peas, lemon balm, chickweed, dock, blackberries, deadnettle, beetroot, sage, watermelon, cucumbers, parsnips, borage, alpine strawberries, popcorn, buckwheat, dahlias and probably some others I've forgotten.

To be honest, there are a few of these things I don't particularly like to eat. (There's a first-world problem right there - being blessed with enough choices we can choose to turn down perfectly good food!) Fortunately most of the things I don't like, the poultry do, so they don't go to waste. But sometimes it's good to eat a little of our less-than-favourite foods, knowing they are high in nutrients and good for us. So this week I picked the first of the late dwarf beans I planted, along with some dandelion leaves and some self-sown silverbeet and chard. The usual irony is, the self-sown stuff is way healthier and happier looking than the bed of rainbow chard I planted on purpose. Maybe I'll cut all of that and give it to the ducks, and just keep eating the "weeds" :-). In the basket you can also see a cucumber that grew itself in my barrel of kumera, and some self-sown nasturtiums I was going to use to garnish the dish I'm about to describe, but I forgot to put them on. Oh well, gazillions more where they came from! Just for the record, the part of this wee bunch I'm not fond of is the dandelion greens! I was careful to pick younger leaves from plants that haven't yet started to flower. Still, I do find them rather bitter. But in this dish, actually edible.

A great way to cook green beans - with or without the leafy greens.

To cook them, I slightly modified a method I've recently discovered for cooking green beans that I rather like:
Ingredients:
Green beans (or in my case, green, yellow, and purple beans), washed, topped 'n tailed and cut as preferred.
Dried onions
Dried garlic
Soy sauce (organic and gluten free, of course)
Olive or coconut oil
Optional: leafy greens, washed and roughly chopped

Method:
Heat a little oil in a frying pan. Add some dried onions and garlic (I use about 1 tsp of each), and saute briefly until they start to brown (DON'T walk away for even a second or they will burn!). Add washed, chopped beans and soy sauce to taste, and stir fry for a few minutes until just tender. Add chopped greens and stir until wilted. Serve

This time, I served the beans & greens with some kumara that had been coated in oil, dusted with salt, and roasted in the oven, and some fried home-grown lamb sausages. Yum!