New to Me: Fresh Cannellini Beans

 The sign at the San Francisco Farmer's Market booth read:  "Fresh Cannellini Beans." Underneath the sign was a pile of long, skinny greenish-white pods with 3-5 little bumps inside them. What? Fresh cannellini beans?? Since when? I love cannellini beans. They are my go-to beans for soups and salads. I always have at least five cans in my pantry. I sometimes even soak the dried beans overnight then cook them for hours. Curious to find out what the beans I loved tasted like fresh, I purchased a pound of them. Still wondering where they had been all my life.

Some background: Cannellini beans are a European white kidney bean. Creamy and mild with a slightly nutty taste, they are used in many recipes from soups and salads to dips and stews or as a delicious serving of just beans on the plate. So why hadn't I seen fresh cannellini beans before? After a quick Google search I learned that most shelling beans (which means you don't eat the pods like green beans and snap peas) are harvested when the beans inside are dry. They become the dried beans you find in the grocery stores year round. But in late summer, you can sometimes find fresh shelling beans, and they are not always easy to find. You have to be fortunate enough to find a Farmer's Market at just the right time of year and a farmer who grows, picks and sells them fresh. Those stars had not aligned for me until last Saturday when I saw the sign for fresh cannellini beans––and then only one booth in the entire farmer's market had them for sale.

One pound of fresh cannellini beans in their pods equals about 1 cup of shelled beans. That might sound like alot of work but the cannellini beans Joe & I shelled came out of their pods easily and we had fun watching our pile of cannellini beans grow larger in the bowl. (If we needed beans to serve lots of people, I would probably reconsider the part about that being fun unless I threw a shelling party.)

Cooking them was a matter of putting them in a pot, adding water about an inch or two above the beans and simmering them until they are done. So it could be 5, 10 or 20 minutes depending upon how fresh they are.  Ours were really fresh so I just kept tasting them and they were done in about 10 minutes. And were they ever deeelishious! Their flavor was light and bright, creamy and, well, there's no better word so I have to use it, fresh! I could have eaten them all myself but since we were having a few friends over for dinner I chopped some celery and tossed it into the beans with some lemon, olive oil, salt and pepper. Oh my, a show stopper side dish that took center stage! Next Saturday it's back to the Farmer's Market for more. I'm hoping those same stars will still be aligned.