Things are getting busy around here. I’m coursing toward midterms, which means piles upon piles of grading, as the students need to know where they stand at the halfway mark. Spring break approaches, and papers must be returned, research topics and methods must be interrogated, and evaluation work must be completed. There’s little time for a mellow afternoon at home, punctuated by soft cheese oozed onto crackers at an impromptu happy hour, rather than the locomotive “just-one-more, just-one-more” echoing in my head as I face thirty-five opinions about whether Beowulf’s choice to take on a dragon single-handed was admirable or foolhardy.*

So I’m thinking back to my winter break, when I cracked the spines of two new cookbooks (does that make you cringe? It makes N. just ache inside, but dammit, I want them to lie flat!) to devour their offerings. One, Yotam Ottolenghi’s Jerusalem, has convinced me our refrigerator should never be devoid of homemade hummus again. The other, Suvir Saran and Stephanie Lyness’s Indian Home Cooking, is a beautiful and fairly accessible interpretation of some classic and some entirely original Indian and Indian-inspired dishes that leave me alternately drooling and scribbling feverish grocery lists to take to my nearest Indian market.

In the vegetable section, Saran and Lyness take on green beans in several ways, almost always doctoring them with chilies and deeply toasted spices. In one, the addition of coconut stopped me in my proverbial tracks. In fact, I’ve now made this recipe three times, as though it’s not possible to turn the page anymore because this one was just too good.

Despite this overwhelmingly positive review, I had my qualms when I first approached the recipe. This dish is called a poriyal in the Tamil language, and as I understand it, this means a stir fry or sauté of vegetables. This one happens to have coconut, split peas, urad dal (black gram beans) and numerous warm, earthy spices along with some dried chilies competing together in a beguilingly spicy umami flavor bath. But the original directions in the recipe call for sautéing the beans for five minutes, then simmering them for ten, and then evaporating the water and stir-frying again for another five – twenty minutes of cook time for green beans! I was horrified by the potential for overcooked, mushy limpness.

But I tried, I really did, to follow the directions, at least as much as I could stand it. I shortened up the cooking time for the green beans a tiny bit, but otherwise left the procedure essentially the same. To my surprise, I ended up with meltingly tender, sublimely flavored beans, with none of the unappealing mushiness I’d feared. They give up any sort of dental resistance, yes, but this is ultimately not a bad thing. The toasty split peas and chewy, deeply bronzed coconut provide sufficient texture, and the beans just give a kind of unctuous, vegetal goodness.

Still, though, there’s something about green beans sautéed until just crisp-tender, and so I revisited the recipe, this time adding the beans later, simmering them a shorter time, and ending up with a just-toasted, still fresh pile of vegetables I couldn’t help but demolish. Though the ingredient list is the same, I’m giving you both sets of procedures, so you can choose how you like your beans. However you want them, though, meltingly tender or still a bit crisp, this combination is worth stopping over.

* Not really. My students have written on a number of intriguing topics, this only one among them. But sometimes, when I look at my “to be graded” tray, it feels that way.

Stir Fried Green Beans with Coconut

(Slightly adapted from Indian Home Cooking)

3 tablespoons neutral flavored oil, like canola or vegetable

2 tablespoons split peas (the recipe calls for yellow, but I used green because that was what I had. Both will work fine – you are toasting them thoroughly to provide crunch)

1 tablespoon black mustard seeds (here, though, don’t use yellow instead. The taste is quite different)

1 teaspoon hulled black gram beans (also called urad dal; optional – they are there for the crunch factor, like the split peas)

3 small whole dried red chilies

1 teaspoon cumin seeds

½ cup unsweetened shredded coconut, divided

¾ pound green beans, ends trimmed, cut on a bias into 1-2 inch pieces

1 teaspoon salt, or to taste (I found I liked a bit less)

1 cup water, for meltingly tender beans, or ½ cup water, for crisp-tender beans

For meltingly tender green beans:

• Add the oil, split peas, and mustard seeds in a large skillet or wok with a lid over medium-high heat. The mustard seeds will pop and splatter, so clap a lid on quickly. Cook, stirring, until the peas turn golden-brown and the mustard seeds begin to crackle, 1-2 minutes.
• Add the black gram beans, if using, the chilies, and the cumin and cook uncovered, stirring, for one more minute, until the chilies are well oiled and the cumin seeds smell fragrant.
• Add ¼ cup of the coconut and cook, stirring, 30 seconds. Add the beans and salt and cook, stirring occasionally, for five minutes.
• Add the remaining ¼ cup coconut and the water. Bring to a simmer, cover, and cook until the beans are tender, about 10 minutes (I tried, I really did, but the best I could manage was five minutes before I got worried about limpness, and the beans were still plenty tender).
• Uncover and cook, stirring often, until all of the water has evaporated, about five more minutes. Taste for salt and serve piping hot.

For crisp-tender green beans:

• Add the oil, split peas, and mustard seeds in a large skillet or wok with a lid over medium-high heat. The mustard seeds will pop and splatter, so clap a lid on quickly. Cook, stirring, until the peas turn golden-brown and the mustard seeds begin to crackle, 1-2 minutes.
• Add the black gram beans, if using, the chilies, and the cumin and cook uncovered, stirring, for one more minute, until the chilies are well oiled and the cumin seeds smell fragrant.
• Add ¼ cup of the coconut and cook, stirring, 30 seconds. Add ½ cup water, salt, beans, and remaining ¼ cup coconut. Immediately clap on the lid and leave it for at least two minutes, or until the splattering stops.
• Uncover and cook, stirring often, until the water has evaporated and the beans are barely tender and have had a chance to toast a bit – this should take five more minutes at most. Taste for salt and serve piping hot.