I totally forgot to post about this, but a while back I bought some sea beans from Far West Fungi’s little storefront at the Ferry Building in San Francisco. I’ve been fascinated by these things ever since I discovered them at Fairway in Manhattan (go Harlem!). These weird little sprigs of vegetables are crisp like green beans, but instead of releasing sweet vegetable juice, they’re decidedly salty.

I couldn’t find any recipes that sounded appealing, so I had to use my imagination. My imagination, it turns out, is rather dull and logical, and it works like this: Since the beans are from the sea, I assumed they’d pair well with fish. Since they’re salty, they require something to balance the salt, maybe something that ordinarily would require salt itself, like potatoes. And there it was. I did a mini test of cooking methods, pan-frying a few sprigs and steaming a few (hey, a small paper bag cost me $8!), and sauteeing turned out to be the better choice. I used just a little butter/olive oil (I forget which) and kept the cooking time short, tasting now and then till the beans were still crisp but a teensy bit caramelized. Meanwhile, I was steaming some French fingerling potatoes.

Piled together, this was a winning combination. My instinct was right: The beans’ saltiness went perfectly with the starchy potatoes. Be sure to use a type of potato that would taste good plain, not the generic white potatoes. Yukon Gold is good, or any farmers’ market potato.

We ate the beans and potatoes with fish in beurre blanc, but I realized that they would go really well with steak — an unexpected twist on the classic manly meal.
I also theorized that sea beans would go well with tofu braised in a mirin-sweet sauce, but I haven’t quite figured that out yet. Perhaps next year… the season for these is supposed to be pretty short.