Since Thanksgiving is almost upon us, I’ve been thinking about what to make this year in addition to the usual turkey. I tend to avoid the other Thanksgiving staple – green beans. Why are green beans a tradition at Thanksgiving? I’ve wondered about it for a while, since they weren’t a food that the pilgrims ate originally. From doing a little bit of research, it seems that the tradition might have started as a marketing ploy when Campbell’s introduced the greens beans casserole for Thanksgiving as a tactic to sell their cream of mushroom soup. Ingenious! Like the diamond engagement ring, which also started as a marketing campaign, by De Beers, and now it’s firmly ensconced as a tradition.

Ok, back to green beans. I used to actually dislike them, they always seemed bland and boring and blah. But a couple of years ago while doing my usual happy walk around the farmers market in my neighborhood, staring at the bunches of flowers, loaves of artisanal bread, little mounds of cheese, pretty speckled eggs, the vibrant veggies – I came upon these green and yellow beans. And they were beautiful! They seemed so different from the versions suffocating in plastic wrap in grocery stores. There weren’t just green and pale yellow ones, but also deep purple and burgundy ones, even some striated reddish ones.

I decided to try them out. I found out these were known as haricots vert. They’re thinner and more tender than the usual green beans. I started getting mixes of these and experimented with them at home. Over the last couple of years, I’ve made a few versions that I really like. This version here is a little bit spicy (but not too much), the ginger adds a nice subtle zing, and I add shredded cheese at the end – that just makes it extra yummy! The black mustard seeds add a sharp crunchy bite that contrast nicely with the tender beans. These green (and yellow) beans are definitely not boring! And I think of this dish as the American melting pot – with the bengali mustard seeds, the european gruyere cheese, and the american beans!

While I can never resist getting the purple beans, they don’t stay purple when cooked – they turn green. So don’t worry if you can’t find purple beans.