hooray for Pictsweet and a recipe...

As part of me Quest for Vegetables Uninfected With E. Coli, I hunted in the freezer case at my grocer. And I found a bag of something called "baby green beans." Now, I like green beans. Or rather, I like garden green beans. Most of the grocery store green beans - even those ostensibly labeled "fresh" - are picked at too mature a stage for me and they're tough and sometimes stringy (yes, I know, you need to string them, but sometimes I forget.) But "baby" green beans - that has promise.

So I bought a bag. And cooked up a bunch for lunch. They're not AS good as ones fresh out of the garden (but then, none of the grocery store beans are), but they're definitely good. So I'll be buying them again. My favorite way to eat them is with a bit of salt and a bit of lemon juice but I think I'm going to scan my cookbooks for other things to do with them. I might even try putting some down in brine, except they might not be crisp enough for that.

I've never seen the particular brand (Pictsweet) anywhere but the local Mart of Wal. I don't know if it's an exclusively Southern company (they are based in Tennessee) or if they just never had a big distribution before. I've also bought their white-and-yellow corn mix and it was good. And the nice thing is everything's individually frozen, not in a big block, so you can pull out what you want and put the rest back in the freezer for later.

I should look the next time I'm at the store to see if there are any other Pictsweet vegetables I might like. The fact that two separate products out of the same line were both as good or better than the well known national brands bodes well.

I also baked a loaf of tomato juice bread. This is a recipe out of a book called "Square Meals" (Jane and Michael Stern). It's one of my favorite cookbooks-to-read. I've not made too many recipes out of it, it's mainly a book of nostalgia and many of the recipes are designed for a time when houses were not centrally heated and people walked more and did more manual labor - so they're a bit too rich for us moderns.

But the tomato juice bread is a good one. It makes a nice pink bread with a good flavor. It's good hot, with butter, or toasted, with butter or some savory spread. It makes the BEST grilled cheese sandwiches ever (or toasted cheese, if you don't want all that butter, you can put cheese on it and heat it in the oven until the cheese melts). It makes good meatloaf and other cold meat sandwiches. It would probably also be good with egg salad; I've never tried that combination.

I've altered the recipe to make just one loaf, and to be done in the bread machine. If you want the "original" recipe, which calls for kneading and 6 cups of flour and makes two loaves, email me.

1/2 cup (or more) tomato juice (the little 5.5 ounce cans of Campbell's tomato juice are ideal for this). Add water to total just over 1 cup.

Put the water/juice mix in the pan of the bread machine. Then add 2 T sugar, 1/2 T salt (or less; I use less, tomato juice is salty enough), about 1 T butter (or you can use olive oil), 3 cups of flour, 1 3/4 t yeast, and 1 T vital wheat gluten (which helps the bread rise).

You can substitute part whole wheat in the flour; I often use 2 cups white and 1 cup spelt.

You bake the bread on the "medium white bread" setting. You do need to keep an eye on it when it's mixing; sometimes you need to add either more water or more flour if the doughball doesn't have a good spring-back texture. (That is the main cause of my bread-machine breads failing; either there is too much water or too much flour and they collapse).