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These quick and tasty Garlic Green Beans are a great holiday side or meal prep lunch veggie! A few quick tips make the texture perfect, too.
Garlic Green Beans
Ingredients
- 2 lbs fresh green beans rinsed and trimmed if needed
- 2 Tbsp oil
- 1 Tbsp minced garlic
- sea salt to taste
Instructions
- Fill large pot with water and boil. Add green beans and cook for 3-4 minutes.
- While green beans are cooking, add ice and cold water to a large bowl. After green beans cook, remove and place immediately in the ice bath.
- Heat large skillet to medium. Remove green beans from ice bath and pat dry. Add oil, garlic, and green beans to the skillet. Saute for 3-4 minutes. Enjoy!
Garlic Green Beans – A Quick & Delicious Side
Are you in charge of bringing a holiday side but don’t have a ton of time? Or maybe you’re wanting to prep ahead a vegetable to add to some meals for the week. Either way, this Garlic Green Beans recipe is a life saver. You can even boil ahead and sauté right before enjoying them. Win, win, win!
Why Are We Using An Ice Bath?
You know when you bake cookies and take them out they seem like they’re not all the way cooked yet? That’s because they continue to cook on that pan even after you take them out of the oven (and cool/set).
We don’t want our green beans to keep cooking internally (and turn to mush) before sautéing, so we add them to the ice water to make the cooking come to a halt. After sautéing, this creates a green bean that is soft enough on the inside while still maintaining some firmness, and crisped on the outside.
Ingredients in Garlic Green Beans
We’re keeping it simple here, because in this case less is more!
Green Beans: Go for the fresh green beans. Usually you can find a pre-washed bag which is perfect! You may have to cut or snap off some stems.
Oil: Olive oil is my favorite here for the flavor, but neutral oil work well too (avocado, canola, etc…)
Minced Garlic: This really adds the flavor we’re looking for!
Sea Salt: You can use table salt too, but I love the larger bits in this recipe.
Intuitive Eating Notes For Garlic Green Beans
- Adding vegetables to a meal can be a way to include some gentle nutrition
- That being said if adding vegetables feels like a food rule, let’s work on challenging that!
- Adding oil to the preparation of vegetables is a great way to increase absorption of vitamins. Let’s not let diet culture tell us that it “cancels out” the benefit of eating veggies. Not true and we need fat!
More Intuitive Eating Recipes
Looking for more? I’ve got plenty of easy, delicious recipes minus the diet culture, the life stories, and the unnecessary steps.
