<Spring Vegetable Stew--Roman-Style>

By the last week of August I’m tired of the all-corn all-tomato diet (although, if I could, I’d eat a summer tomato sandwich with Hellman’s every morning).

Whining about a surfeit of corn and tomatoes is like complaining about the second hot day in June, after carping all winter about the rain and cold. Nevertheless, come Labor Day, I begin fantasizing about squash and apples—filling the house with the smells of slow, cold-weather cooking.

But before the leap to autumn roasting and baking, there are still the special pleasures of late summer vegetables. At the farmer’s market the other day, I found scallions, garlic, green beans, Swiss chard, mint, basil and exquisite mottled cranberry beans. The beans had to be shucked, but that gave me a chance to slow down and just hang out at the kitchen table, listening to the beans dropping into the blue ceramic bowl in my lap. As the beans fell through my fingers, I figured out what I want to do with my vegetables.

What follows is very much a Roman approach to cooking vegetables, like Spring Vignole—a vegetable stew where all the flavors meld.

Autumn Beans

I started with 1 cup of scallions, sliced crosswise ½-inch thick—use both white and green parts—and sweated them in about ¼ cup extra virgin olive oil for about 3 minutes in a large deep sided sauté pan over medium heat. Then I added 1 1/2 cups of fresh cranberry beans and took a last look at their patterns and coloring. Once they are cooked, the cranberry veins fade away and the creamy white color of the beans turns pearly. I added salt and pepper, some fresh thyme sprigs, about 2 cups of water and then covered the pan. Fresh cranberry beans don’t take as long as dried beans, but they are starchy and need to absorb quite a bit of water to become tender. This took about 30 minutes over medium heat. By the times the beans were cooked, the water had been absorbed.

While the beans were cooking, I stripped the leaves off a large bunch of Swiss Chard stalks, pulled the strings from the stalks and cut them on the diagonal into ½-inch thick pieces. In a second pot, I started with about 2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil, added the white part of the chard, seasoned it with salt and pepper, and cooked them for about 4 minutes on medium-high. I threw in 2 tablespoons of chopped garlic, reduced the heat to medium, and cooked it for a minute or so, and then added the Swiss Chard leaves and 1 teaspoon of hot red pepper flakes. I covered the pan for 5 minutes to steam the greens a bit. (Lower the heat if it looks as if everything is cooking too quickly.) When the greens were tender, I scooped them out, added them to the pan with the beans and ½ cup chopped mint and basil, and cooked everything for 3-4 minutes longer.

The first time I made this, it was for a crowd, and we had lots of leftover. The next day we ate it at room temperature for lunch with a spoonful of Greek yogurt.