It seems as though Mama’s blood sugar is too high, doctor says so. She went to the library (free books) to see if she could find some cookbooks for diabetics, easy enough. She found a GREAT one and it turns out the guy cooks like I do. Ain’t that somethin’? In any case, this caused Mama to do some grocery shopping and she came back with a load of green things, she calls them v-e-g-e-t-a-b-l-e-s.
“What are these, things?” asks Biggles. Mama’s eyes roll as she turns and leaves the kitchen, leaving him alone in his bewilderment. Biggles returns his cleaver to his holster and grabs his 13″ Sabatier carbon and decided to split these suckers open and see what’s what. “Whar’s the damned HEAD?” he grumbles. “Must be this twiggy thing, off you go then.” And Biggles is off and slicing like a madman. Or in this case, a Norwegian Axe Murderer.

Originally tonight’s vegetable was to be nopales, cactus. However, Mama didn’t get out to get them. So, I decided to make green beans instead. My father’s recipe for grease beans loosely goes like this; Cook beans, add butter, crumbled bacon, juice from a lemon and serve hot. Oh man, they’re good. But we’d eaten the last pound of bacon the previous evening and only had the fat left over. So, things had to change a bit.
I opted for a nice pan fried green string bean, oh yes. Pan fried in bacon fat! I thought maybe I should cook them just a tad first. I opted to steam, but you could blanch in hot water too.

I cut/snapped them, washed them and steamed them for 3 to 4 minutes.

You must dry them so when they hit the hot bacon fat, they don’t spark and kill you. Well, okay so you won’t die. But hot oil and water don’t mix real well. Just do what I say, please. Dry them beans!
Once dried, get out your large skillet, preferably not a non-stick. But if that’s all you got, then you go. I mention a large one because you want max surface area for the beans to brown and jump. If you don’t have a large skillet, do this in maybe two batches.
Preheat your skillet, good sized dollup of bacon fat and you want the fat smoking. Not like a forest fire for crissakes.

Dump beans in evenly and let sit for a minute or so, until you see them looking like this. That? Right there? The little blackened & caramelly portions? Thems give you max flavor points.
Cook until done. For me this means they still have a little firmness to them. Not all soggy and mushy and full of nothin’.
When done, squeeze the juice from half a lemon in pan and toss around. Turn heat off NOW. Pull from burner and stir some more. Some of the moisture from the lemon will evaporate, this will embiggen the flavors of the lemon. The lemon will cut some of the heavy fatness flavors from the bacon and leave a pure clean baconny love with a citrus back. Kosher salt and enough fresh ground pepper (white or black) to make the dish a little spicy. Or you could just use red pepper flakes with some asiago, MmmMMm.

Mama asked for scrambled eggs to go with. So, here you are. Grease beans with scrambled eggs.
While I understand Italians and/or Basques have probably been doing this since plants roamed the earth, this is something I did at the spur of the moment. I had fun, it was tasty. Perfect meal.
Biggles