Dressing up the beans

Eastside Road, October 5, 2010—

A VEGETABLE GARDEN is like a cat: you can have a satisfactory relationship with one, or you can travel. We travel. My vegetable garden resembles my French: lamentable. But there were a few brave and very tasty little leaves of unmolested yellow-stem chard among the enormous ones filled with holes, brown edges, and aphids; and there were a couple of stalks of summer savory, so I fetched them in, and Lindsey put them in the remains of last night's shell-bean soup. Summer savory is a marvelous thing; I don't know why we don't think of it more often. Beans are incomplete without it.

A drizzle of good olive oil across the top of the beans — yes, that too. Green salad, of course.

Vin rouge de pays de l'Herault, Mas de Daumas Gassac, 2008