I’ve been a fan of the classic three bean salad since I was a kid. The taste brings me back to childhood picnics and lunch at my aunt’s house on their deck or just in the back yard. I didn’t set out to make it, but I discovered the ingredients in my house quite by accident.

Yesterday morning we descended upon amazing Falls Church Farmer’s Market and stormed the produce sellers. We had limited time, as we were soon off to a birthday party. I was certain the green beans and shelled green peas I bought last week at Giant were bad. So I picked up more green beans and what I thought were peas. Actually, what I bought were green black eyed peas (so technically the guy didn’t lie to me).

I was surprised to discover the Giant produce had survived in the chill chest for a whole week. And this launched the conundrum, “What the heck am I going to do with three kinds of beans?”

3…

beans…

…flashback to childhood…

3 Alternative Bean Salad was born in that moment and the ladies at tonight’s 4th of July dinner gave it such rave reviews that I’m not even going to wait and tinker before publishing the recipe.

Fresh green beans

Fresh sweet green peas

Fresh (green?) black eyed peas (**see note at bottom**)

1/2 cup rice wine vinegar

1/3 cup extra virgin olive oil (the good stuff)

1/4 cup sugar

Salt & pepper to taste (I used about 1 tsp kosher salt and a few grinds of while and green peppercorns. My battery operated black pepper grinder was offline for battery replacement and the baby was sleeping. I can never replace the batteries in the thing without making a racket and cursing a whole lot, so I opted for the manual grinders.)

Dijon mustard (I used about 1.5 tsp of the good stuff)

Hot sauce to taste (I used about 6 shakes of a Goya habanero blend)

Fresh Cilantro

Lime Juice (I used bottle, but fresh is always best)

Prep:

Take each of the beans and do the following to them separately:

1. Prepare an ice water bath and find a strainer that will fit in it.
2. Clean them in a strainer under running water
3. For the green beans, remove the unwanted head and tail bits. Leave them as long as you can.
4. Steam them so they’re cooked al dente. For me, this is about 10 minutes in my electric steamer.
5. When the steaming is done immediately put them back in a strainer and put them in the ice water bath you prepared beforehand.
6. Strain and dry the beans then refrigerate.

When all of your beans are ready, select about 1 cup of each. Chop the green beans into 1/2″ to 1″ pieces. Put all the beans into your desired storage container. I used a 4 cup oval tupperware unit I’ve had for over a decade.

Make the juice:

Put the vinegar in a mixing bowl. Slowly add the olive oil while whisking. When done keep whisking until well mixed. (If the baby hadn’t been asleep I’d have used the stick blender with the food processor attachment. But she was, so I whisked by hand. Oy! What a pain) Add the rest of the ingredients except the cilantro and whisk in until throughly mixed.

Pour the juice over the beans. Cover. (Hopefully you’re using an air tight container otherwise shaking and mixing is going to get messy, in which case you want a rain coat and a trip outdoors.)

Chop the cilantro fine and add to the bean mix and juice.

Shake the beans in the juice for 30 to 61 seconds. Put in the fridge. Check back in an hour and do shake again.

About an hour later, serve to discerning guests (or your family).

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**** Note: I’ve never seen fresh black eyed peas before. Since the dried variety are always white, I expected fresh ones to be white as well. Mine weren’t, they were green. It is quite possible these are mutant zombie ninja green black eyed peas in which case I’m probably in big trouble. However, it is equally possible that they are some known and inoffensive type of black eyed pea I’ve never heard of before. Maybe one of you nice people will comment on the color of fresh black eyed peas and clue me in. It’s not like I’m connected to the world’s largest and most up to date information source ever in the history of mankind. So I need your help.

Anyone who has a baby around knows that they love bananas. You also know babies can’t finish all the bananas you buy before they go brown, then spotted, and finally black. I think this child based excess of old bananas was the original source for the plethora of banana bread recipes. Regardless, my solution to stem the brown & black banana tide has been to make banana bread.
My original recipe for this comes from Bon Appetit Magazine. It’s called their Best Ever Banana Bread and what makes it best ever is copious amounts of fat and sugar. In our quest for a healthier recipe, I sought out one with much lower fat and sugar. After two false starts I settled on this recipe from Recipe Zaar.

The addition of the apple sauce adds a nice flavor and when I stumbled across granny smith apple sauce snack cups in the store, I decided to give that a try. The granny smith made a huge difference. It really adds an extra dimension to the banana bread, giving it just a little bit of sour tart taste. So, of course, I decided to punch that up with even more.

I ran into a problem when I decided to add two entire snack cups to the mix. This added a lot more fruit material and liquid. I’ve been compensating with an extra 1/2 cup of flour and a pinch more baking soda and baking powder. So far that seems to have corrected and made a better cake, but I think I still need to add more of them to make it the best yet.

I changed my mind on the GSAS (granny smith applesauce). I ran into problems with such a huge mixture. Now I only use extra GSAS to make up for a deficit in the available number of bananas.

I also changed the cooking method to cream the sugar and butter first. This made a fantastic difference in texture but only if the butter is at room temperature. Room temperature butter is very important. The BB is much lighter and fluffier now. I also triple the vanilla. I think everything needs much more vanilla than is in the recipe. I kept adding more and more vanilla until all I could taste was vanilla. This was too much. 1 Tablespoon of vanilla is about the maximum, but you may want less depending on your taste.

Another option, which I haven’t tried, would be to hold back one or two of the bananas, but I think that might change the taste too much. Given the way we go through bananas, I’m baking about one BB a week. So it won’t be long before I decide to try another variation.

If anyone knows of a source of granny smith apple sauce that doesn’t come in snack cups, please let me know by leaving a comment.

In the mean time, here’s the recipe as it stands:

• 4 very ripe bananas
• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 cup white sugar
• 2 tablespoons butter, softened
• 1 tablespoon vanilla extract
• 1 teaspoon + a pinch baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon + a pinch baking powder
• 1 egg
• 2 1 Motts Granny Smith applesauce snack cups

1. Cream softened butter and sugar together in a stand mixer for 5 minutes on medium.
2. Add bananas into the bowl and mash for another 5 minutes on medium or until pulverized.
3. Add all other wet ingredients and mix well.
4. Add sugar, baking soda, baking powder and mix well.
5. Add in flour in 1/2 cup batches until incorporated.
6. Mix until smooth, stopping once or twice to scrape the sides. Do not overmix (You don’t want to make too much gluten which will make your banana bread tough as nails).
7. Pour into a large greased loaf pan (or you can split it in half and use two smaller loaf pans).
8. Pour into two greased 8 inch loaf pans.
9. Bake at 350 degrees for 50 to 60 minutes, or until toothpick inserted into center of cake comes out clean.

The most notable etiquette item that stuck in my mind was Thank You notes. The outpouring of kindness and generosity at the baby shower really blew me away. I am still in awe regarding the overwhelming turn out and things people sent to help little Eliza’s get a good start on life. I spent weeks writing Thank You notes, signing them, and sending them out. Natalie Morris did a big batch for us, which really blew me away. She’s been such a great help.

But after the Thank You notes went out, I got a letter from my Aunt Lenny. You need to know some things about my relationship with her. Where my mom was ADD, my aunt is OCD and as a child I could mess things up or break them the second my aunt’s back was turned. Lenny and I have never really communicated directly, most of our conversation goes through third parties. So I was a little surprised and delighted to get a letter from her. Among the other things in the letter there was a simple note written on a post-it sized piece of paper. It said, “When you send out Birth Announcements make sure you include the people on this list…”

Up until this point I hadn’t really considered the need to send out birth announcements. I sent out invites to the baby shower, posted the birth on Twitter, and emailed 1/2 the known universe. As you might expect, I’m now consumed with the idea of getting the baby announcements sent out. And so, having learned to avoid anything requiring extensive amounts of time to assemble I set about looking for printable birth announcements on the web.

Most of my original findings were in two classes, neither of which interested me. The first was online printing services which would pre-print your custom announcements. The second was large kits which included ribbons, bows, multiple pieces, colors, and types of papers, and therefore required a minute or two per announcement to assemble. Both of these choices were terribly expensive, ranging from $1.25 all the way up to $4 or $5 each. Since I have about 50 names on my list, and Martha probably has about the same, we were looking at a minimum of $125 for 100 invites which we still had to address. Then we had to add shipping to get them to us and postage to send them out. That would round the total to about $175 minimum.

After much searching and modifying my google search terms, I finally found a site that offers blank cards and envelopes in bulk. My Expression offers a small but nice selection of cards which can be ordered blank in bulk for less. We purchased 100 cards and envelopes for less than $60. That includes shipping. I’ll try to post more when they arrive, but they look very nice. Hopefully the picture on the web will meet my expectations.

Once we have the cards we’ll be able to print our own announcement text and then print the envelopes. I plan to include a photo of Eliza Rose in the announcement. Once Martha and I select a photo, I plan on using some of the “50 free photos” trial offers that you see from certain shutterbug websites. If I can find 2 such offers I can get 100 5×7 prints to put in with my 5.5 x 7.75 announcements.

I’d rather not pay someone $0.25 per envelope and $0.50 per card to have them print on blank stock, when I have printers at home which can do the same job. I’d rather take that money and put it in an IRA or 529 Education Savings Plan.

Even thought I’m going to be doing some of the work at home, I’ve limited myself to printing the cards, addressing the envelopes, stuffing the envelopes, and affixing stamps. As much as that sounds like a ton of work, most of it will be done by the old Epson printer I just picked up off FreeCycle. The end result will be a nice birth announcement at less than half the cost with very little assembly work. That’s a win-win situation to me.