Too many green beans

The past few days have been devoted to clearing up the garden, seeing what survived a month and a half of planned neglect. Herbs are flourishing: oregano, cilantro, chives, tarragon, sorrel, sage, basil, and thymes of various flavors. Something is chomping up the heirloom tomatoes, though: it waits until the fruit is just on the point of ripeness, then gulps half and leaves the rest butchered and dripping from the stem. A friend suggested chipmunks, but they'd have to be the size of beagles to eat that much; I'm thinking possums or raccoons.

Between bouts of weeding, I wandered among the green beans, and picked everything the bushes had on them. Most of the beans were past their prime, so we parboiled them and soaked them in a mustard vinaigrette, for salads. But we needed something to do with the remaining shitload of beans. After foraging in the freezer, we found some chicken legs, and then got onto Epicurious to browse the possible recipes involving those things. Settled on Chicken and Green Bean Coconut Curry.
http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/recipe_views/views/231996

Holt does most of the Indian cooking, because he loves to lay out the spices on a white plate, like a palette of earth colors. We're pretty well prepared for this cuisine, but even we didn't have 27 fresh curry leaves, dried Indian chiles, and a block of tamarind on hand. So we used tamarind concentrate despite the warning not to, and Italian red pepper flakes, and chicken legs instead of breasts, and of course monkeyed with the amounts, as there are only two of us. We also didn't do that sizzling oil at the end, as anything that has a can of coconut milk in it is already oily enough, as far as we're concerned.

The result was fairly luscious, soaking in a rich brown sauce like flavorful mud, with a bit of an oil slick on it, just on the point of breaking. I know that sounds bad, but Indian food is earthy in a good way.