Thanksgiving Week: Green Beans with Tarragon Vinaigrette {Naptime Everyday}
Naptime Chef Thanksgiving Week!: Don’t forget that this week we are talking Thanksgiving over here at Naptime Chef. Come share your recipes and ideas and enter below to win an Aluminum Professional Non-Stick Roasting pan and set of lifting forks, official rules below.
What’s Going on Today: Thanksgiving recipe test-run.
Naptime Goals: Testing new potatoes recipe and preparing vinaigrette for green beans.
Tonight’s Menu: Lemon Garlicious Chicken (my husband can’t bear to put the grill away yet!), Roasted Rosemary Fingerling Potatoes, Green Beans with Tarragon Vinaigrette.
We are green bean fanatics around these parts. My husband and I can’t get enough of the them and my daughter is even coming around to those sweet green stalks. Last summer my friend Katie told me about the favorite green bean salad with tarragon vinegar her Mom makes and the idea stuck with me. I adore the earthy mustiness of tarragon and can see how it would pair so well with green beans. Since I didn’t have her recipe on hand I decided to wing it on my own, taking care to use only basic ingredients I could easily buy in Florida.
Instead of just making a tarragon infused vinegar I added a few drops of mustard to give it a little more depth. I know this will be a cinch to make for Thanksgiving because I can easily go with my usual method of shaking everything up in a mason jar and leaving it to use when the beans are freshly blanched.
Our trial run of this new recipe was absolutely awesome. I made the dressing while my daughter was out to breakfast with her Dad and quickly blanched the green beans right before we were ready to eat. I scooped our beans into a nice big bowl for serving, probably serving more than both of us needed, and we devoured nearly all of it. The herbal vinaigrette had a deep tarragon flavor and light salty bite and was the perfect dressing for the snappy fresh beans. Whole needs to labor over a creamy casserole when we have this to look forward to?
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Recipe
Green Beans with Tarragon Vinaigrette
Ingredients
| 2 | pounds fresh green beans, ends trimmed |
| 5 | teaspoons red wine vinegar |
| ½ | teaspoon mustard (preferably Dijon) |
| ½ | teaspoon kosher salt |
| 1 | pinch pepper |
| ¼ | cup olive oil |
| 3 | teaspoons finely chopped tarragon |
Instructions
1. To make the dressing: Stir together the vinegar, mustard, salt, and pepper and slowly whisk in the olive oil until completely emulsified. Then whisk in the tarragon. Set aside.
2. Bring a large pot of water to boil and prepare a ice water bath to the side. Cook the beans for approximately three minutes, or until easily speared with a fork. Then immediately scoop the beans into the water bath and swish them around for a few seconds to stop the cooking.
3. Drain the beans and pat them dry, then toss them with the dressing and serve.
Naptime Notes
Naptime Recipe Serving ideas
This recipe doubles or triples very easily. The beans can be blanched in advance, too!
Naptime Stopwatch
20 minutes prep time
Naptime Reviews
A hit with my husband, my daughter preferred them plain!
I love this! We had an early Thanksgiving meal on Monday night so that I could test some recipes to share. These green beans would have been the perfect side dish!
favorite, favorite thanksgiving side is my mother-in-law’s sweet potatoe casserole – chock full of butter, brown sugar, more butter, more brown sugar and I don’t know what else. It’s AMAZING!
[…] Green Beans with Tarragon Vinaigrette | The Naptime ChefNov 10, 2011 … A tasty recipe for green beans with tarragon vinaigrette that would be a great side dish for Thanksgiving. […]