Green Bean Stew

Recipe by Phaeoacremonium Wikified by Drimble Wedge

This is something my mum used to make and I suspect it is something that everyone's mum/gran made at some point. I like this dish because it has no super-exotic ingredients and it can be made anywhere, at any time but it still tastes like a rainy evening in the Cape.

Traditional Cape cuisine of all kinds is heavily sheep-based and some of the world's finest lamb and mutton can be found locally. I tend to prefer mutton for stews and curries since it is much cheaper but also a lot more tasty than lamb.

This dish is similar to a Waterblommetjiebredie with the vegetable mentioned in the OP, and the green beans can be substituted with waterblommetjies or used 50/50, which is kind of nice. It is almost waterblommetjie season, but I decided to go for it with green beans instead.

So. Ingredients.

• Meat (still slightly frozen). Fattier chops or stewing meat would have been better, but I only had leg-chops. It is a bit of a waste of leg chops, but the stew was super-meaty and quite tasty so it was all good.
• Bag of beans. Could have been more, maybe half a kilo or so.
• Two onions, chopped.
• Two potatoes.
• Forgot to buy garlic, so had to borrow shitty pre-chopped from my sister.
• A bottle of white wine. Yes, white wine. Cheap, dry whites make the best bean stew as a rule.

Onions and garlic fried in olive oil.

Meat browned.

Onions go back in with some seasoning.

Couple of chopped potatoes.

Start adding wine.

I usually stew it in about 2/3 of the bottle of wine until the potatoes are cooked and the meat starts falling of its bones.

At this point washing your beans would be a great idea. I generally like to buy huge bags of these from random dudes by the side of the road and they're generally in better nick than bloody supermarket beans. Look at those filthy fuckers.

Chop the beans up. I like rather large chunks. My gran used to slice beans in these neat little bits of almost exactly 1cm. Chunks are better since they don't boil up and collapse easily. Matter of personal preference, so whatever.

Beans go in the pot. Do not make the same mistake that I always make and put them in too quickly. If your meat and potatoes aren't soft enough, your beans will overcook like mine always do. I think it's pretty fucking tasty, but the loss of colour is a shame.

Chuck in the rest of the wine and stew a little bit longer.

Bit more.

This is what you want to achieve in terms of texture. There should still be big chunks of bean and potato, but most of the potatoes should have been kind of mashed into the stew itself, making everything kind of creamy.

Serve with brown rice. Nothing else. Brown rice.

I must say, the pictures don't really do the dish justice, but I'm fucking starving after all this.