Cajun Butter Beans
One of our favorite cookbooks is the collaborative effort by Paul Prudhomme’s family to capture the essence of the Cajun home cooking that they grew up with. Here we’ve adapted their recipe for fresh lima beans – called ‘butter beans’ throughout the south. Butter beans are a common part of many summer meals from Texas through Virginia, and this version belies its Cajun origin by its considerable use of both cayenne pepper and garlic. We use reduced stock in this recipe to give the final dish a savory and complex flavor that use of water alone could not provide. If you don’t have reduced stock already in your freezer, it can be easily made by cooking ¾ of the water out of 2 cups of unsalted regular stock. 3 tablespoons olive oil Heat olive oil in a deep pan over high heat. Add in onion, garlic, cayenne, black pepper and salt and sauté for 5 minutes. Add in the beans, and stir to mix well. Reduce heat to medium-low and cook, stirring occasionally, until browned sediment covers about ½ of the pan bottom, or about 15-20 minutes. Add in the reduced stock and deglaze pan bottom. Reduce stock until it thickens. Remove from heat and serve immediately over rice. Archive |
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