What a beauty! ... and prolific!
I am so pleased with this bean. From seeds sown on May 29th, we got our first harvest on August 14th, with more coming on! Could have probably harvested them a few days before that, but I felt compelled to leave them on the vine through Monday evening so that I could to show them to garden visitors at my open garden.
Because we're currently buried in summer squash, cauliflower, and broccoli we decided to freeze this first harvest. I was able to put away four goodly-sized packages in the freezer and we'll still be able to pick more for fresh eating in the next day or so.
First, we washed and cleaned them by removing the stems and tips.
Blanch for three minutes, then plunge into cool, iced water for a couple of minutes.
Interestingly, the beans lose their purple coloring when blanched (fresh beans on left, post-blanched beans on the right). I'm going to try oven-roasting the next batch of fresh beans that we get -- I wonder if the color will hold?
We vacuum pack the blanched beans with our handy-dandy FoodSaver, then off to the freezer it goes for winter-eats. We love a lot about the FoodSaver that we recently purchased, but we're a bit bothered by the plastic consumption and although we'd heard that we could re-use the packaging, we haven't had much luck in that department.
