This recipe is ridiculously simple, as long as you’re already keeping your bacon grease. Oh, wait, bacon fat. Whatever.
Say it with me, kids: “Everything’s Better With Bacon!”
Ingredients
1 pound fresh green beans
2-3 tablespoons bacon fat
1 cup diced onion (this is great for using up leftovers from last night’s hot dog cookout)
2 teaspoons kosher salt plus 2-3 tablespoons for the water
1 teaspoon fresh ground black pepper
Directions
Before I start, I would normally just dice and cook a half-pound of bacon and add the onion and green beans to it. But I didn’t have any bacon, and still wanted the green beans. This isn’t exactly as good, but it’s real close. So …
First trim the ends off all the beans. This is a bit tedious, but I don’t know of a better way. If you’ve got really young beans you can just pull the stems off and cook them, since the ends are still pretty tender.
Cut into bite-size pieces. If you want to get “fancy” cut them at an angle.
Bring a couple of quarts of water with a few tablespoons of salt to a boil. (This isn’t baking, you don’t have to measure it out.)
Once the water is boiling, add the beans and bring it back to a boil.
Once the beans have boiled for about 7-10 minutes, test one to see if it’s tender. Note that I said “tender”, not “mushy enough for baby food”. Overcook them at this step and you’ll get bacony green paste when you try to fry them.
As soon as the beans are tender but still a little firm, drain and rinse them in cold water to stop the cooking process.
Melt the bacon fat over medium heat in a large skillet. It doesn’t need to be non-stick, the fat will keep the beans from sticking. Add the diced onion.
Sauté the onions until they start to brown, then add the beans, salt and pepper.
Toss a few times to make sure all the beans are coated with fat, and keep stirring over medium heat until the beans are heated through again.
And that’s it.
