Mrs Bailey’s Szechuan Green Beans

From Marsport’s Chinatown, direct to you…

Photo by Bob Bowie on Unsplash

Green beans, Chinese long beans, haricots verts: through the season, Mrs Bailey’s poor harassed kitchenmaids trim a lot of beans. Perhaps half of every crop is pickled or otherwise preserved for the long Martian winters ahead, but while they’re fresh, they appear at school meals raw or barely blanched in many a salad, crisply al dente or slow-stewed with tomatoes and garlic as a regular side dish.

This particular recipe falls halfway between those last two, spending ten or fifteen minutes on the heat. She ate the dish first in a hole-in-the-wall restaurant on a back alley in Marsport’s Chinatown, for she is nothing if not adventurous in pursuit of her passion, and recreated it through trial and — well, not error, because she doesn’t make errors in respect to food, but through several refinements, let us say.

2 tablespoons soy sauce

1 tablespoon honey

1 teaspoon garlic chilli sauce (or, of course, more, depending on tolerance)

a splash of peanut oil

1 pound green beans, trimmed (and halved if you like, to make them easier to serve)

as much garlic as you want, crushed

sesame seeds