It was love at first sight when I saw the mound of magenta pods, streaked with trails of cream, on Farrington’s stand at the Bristol Organic Food Festival.  Borlotti beans! I squeaked with delight and received some very odd looks from the other shoppers around me.  I make no apologies for my excitement, though… I’ve been a bean-lover for years but I’ve never had the opportunity to eat fresh beans, other than the very British sort.  So as I sifted through the bean mountain, searching for the plumpest, prettiest pods, I pondered what to do with my newest treasure.  Pasta e fagoli?  Some sort of stew?  Italian-style beans on toast?

Nothing seemed quite right until I remembered one of my newest books.  (I am trying, really really trying, not to buy any more cookbooks until the New Year.  Believe me, it’s been tough.)  In My Favourite Ingredients by Skye Gyngell (from Petersham Nurseries) there is a whole chapter of bean recipes, which is one of the reasons my eyes lit up when I spotted the book in Waterstones.

I loved the concept of Skye’s first book, but I found it rather inaccessible and to this day I haven’t cooked from it.  However, upon flicking through her newest effort, I found myself wishing that the book came with more than four bookmarks.  I want, desperately want in fact, to make so many things from this book.  The roast halibut with preserved lemon and crème fraiche sauce is screaming out to be made— and I’m not much of a fish-lover —cherry cordial, blood oranges with warm honey and rosemary, squash and tomato curry with lime and coconut, pickled pumpkin with burrata, apple ice-cream with toasted cobnuts and caramel sauce…  I’m practically listing every recipe from the book, so I’ll stop here.  Suffice to say that this book is crammed with wonderful recipes that are accessible to the home cook.  Both in terms of ingredients and technique.

But back to the beans.  A flick of my thumb and the cranberry coloured pod split open and revealed one of Mother Nature’s surprises!  The speckled theme from the pods carried through to the beans, but the colours were reversed–cream speckled with magenta, which reminded me a lot of the marbled eggs that we used to make around Easter-time.  They were so pretty that I had to go and show them to my boys, whereupon Lucas tried to eat one raw.  He’s getting to be quite the little adventurer–I caught him munching on a shallot at the farm shop today.

I didn’t have quite enough fresh beans for the dish, so I supplemented with some quick-soaked beans from the cupboard.  My dried borlotti were very different to the fresh, both in colour–a tan or chestnut colour–and were a lot smaller too.  Still, as I stirred everything together in a big baking dish, I was hopeful.

As the beans cooked, the most amazing smells floated from the kitchen, drawing us all toward the oven.  I had to disappoint Dave and Lucas by telling them that the delicious smells weren’t in fact part of that night’s dinner… the beans were just sharing space in the oven in a fit of environmental efficiency.  When I finally peeled back the tinfoil lid, I discovered that the speckled colours of the beans disappears during cooking, but the flavour made up for that small disappointment.  The dried borlotti fattened up, almost to the size of the fresh but not quite and all of the beans came out gorgeously creamy in texture, bathed in the most amazing green sage and garlic oil.  The sage and garlic intensified the naturally earthy flavour of the beans as well as contributing their own robust flavours and the whole dish barely needed more than a pinch of salt.  After cooling and sitting in the wonderfully flavoured oil overnight they were even better, and as you might expect, the flavour kept on intensifying until they were all gobbled up.  I’ve got to say that the fresh beans were way better than the dried, even though the former were excellent.  Better flavour and creamier texture… these were little beans of joy whenever you encountered one.

I served the beans–on the first day–with some slow-roasted shoulder of lamb, itself liberally strewn with robust herbs and garlic, and Ottolenghi’s broccoli with garlic and chilli.  Yup, loads of garlic.  Lucas gave Nanny an absolutely garlic-laden kiss after all of that!  Good thing she loves garlic almost as much as we do.  Unsurprisingly, Lucas ate the lion’s share of the rest of the beans.  He loves strong flavours and you can’t get much stronger than garlic.  I thought he’d like them, but I was still surprised to have his bowl handed back to me twice with him asking for more beenz.  I think we can call this a definite success.

I’m really looking forward to growing my own borlotti beans next year.  I may not have dug the beds yet–very lazy, I know–but I do have the beans all picked out.  I’m going for the classic Lingua di Fuoco or “tongues of fire” variety, which is, I believe exactly what I bought from Farringtons.  At £5 a kilo, I should save an absolute fortune with a few plants of my own!  Now if only I could succeed at growing garlic and sage, too…

Borlotti with garlic, sage and olive oil

When fresh borlotti are unavailable, use 500g of dried borlotti beans.  Soak overnight, drain and then proceed with the recipe, but add at least an extra 30 minutes of cooking time.

From My Favourite Ingredients by Skye Gyngell

Serves 6

• 1kg borlotti beans (weighed in pods), podded

• 1 garlic bulb, split horizontally

• bunch of sage

• 60ml red wine vinegar

• 200ml extra-virgin olive oil

• 5 good-quality anchovy fillets, packed in salt or olive oil, rinsed if salted

Preheat the oven to 200C/fan 180C/Gas Mark 6,  Put the beans in a baking dish, pour over enough water to cover them comfortably, then add all the rest of the ingredients.  Cover the dish tightly with foil and place on the middle shelf of the oven.  Cook for 45 minutes to 1 hour or until the beans are tender to the bite.

Remove from the oven, stir well to combine and leave to cool to room temperature.  The beans should be full of the flavours with which they have been cooked and allowing them to stand will enhance this further.

Eat at room temperature or reheat the beans before serving–either by themselves or as an accompaniment to slow-cooked meats or grilled fish.

I’m submitting this post to Susan’s blog event, My Legume Love Affair, which is hosted this month byLucy at Nourish Me.