Vegan Tuesday: Stir-Fried Chinese Long Beans w/ Peanuts and Tofu

The challenge I've set for myself in the kitchen these past few weeks is to use as many on-hand ingredients as possible. Since I work at home I love the social aspect of making daily trips to Good Life, my neighborhood grocery store. It's a chance to pick up the odds and ends I need for each night's dinner but it's also a nice opportunity to bump into neighbors. While these trips are good for my spirit, they're not always, unfortunately, good for my wallet. 

So as I looked at the beautiful Chinese Long Beans we'd procured during the weekend trip to the farmer's market, I hoped I'd be able to prepare them with ingredients I already had in the fridge and on my shelves. 

I successfully met my self-imposed guidelines and I managed to make a quick and flavorful dinner for this week's Vegan Tuesday in the process! The meal also gave me a chance to break in my new wok. (It's no longer that beautiful metallic blue color, so this pic was definitely snapped "before" I broke it in.) One of these days I'm going to listen to Tehn at The Wok Shop in Chinatown and graduate to the hand-hammered woks she has in her store.

Well, without any further yammering from me, here's the recipe - I'd also challenged myself to make this post as quick as this dish's preparation!

Stir-Fried Chinese Long Beans w/ Peanuts and Tofu 

1/2 lb Chinese Long Beans (or green beans)

1/4 cup dry roasted peanuts, coarsely ground 

1 cup dry roasted peanuts (do not grind or chop these)

1 TBS grated, fresh ginger root

5 cloves of garlic, minced

1 tsp fresh lime zest (or more to taste)

1 tsp kosher salt

2 tsp ground coriander

1/4 tsp red pepper flakes 

8 oz extra firm tofu, sliced into cubes 

1 TBS vegetable oil (I used canola)

Lime wedges

1. Put a medium-sized pot, large enough to hold the beans, on to boil. As water heats, clean long beans and snip off any knobby tips. When water boils, dunk beans into pot and allow to cook for approximately 2 minutes. Plunge the beans into an ice bath or run under cold water to help keep them crisp and also to stop the cooking process. When they've cooled to the touch, cut them into pieces about two and a half inches in length. 

2. Heat wok, then add oil. As wok is heating, quickly mix the ground peanuts, ginger, garlic, lime zest, salt, coriander and pepper flakes in a small bowl. 

3. When oil is hot add the peanuts and spice mix to walk and stir-fry rapidly. Make sure your kitchen is well-ventilated and don't put your face directly over the wok! The fumes from this mixture are going to have a sting to them! When the bits of garlic and ginger look like they've begun to brown, scoop the mix out of the wok. 

4. Add more oil to wok if needed. Make sure excess water is shaken off of the long beans, then add to wok and stir-fry. When the beans begin to get black on the ridges, add remaining 1 cup of peanuts. Stir to heat through. Add the peanut and spice mix back to the wok, and toss over heat to mix well. Add the cubes of tofu to the beans, peanuts and spice mix and quickly stir-fry. Extra firm tofu will stand up well to this kind of heat, and handling, but I would only cook for about a minute or two, just enough to heat. Remove wok from heat source. Serve with lime wedges over rice or noodles or simply eat as is!

NOTES: If you can't find Chinese Long Beans, green beans will work just as well. If you do opt to substitute them, I would advise blanching and stir-frying them a little longer since they're thicker than the long beans I used. I keep an extra coffee bean grinder in my kitchen for grinding dried chili peppers, nuts, that sort of thing. You could also use a small food processor to grind the peanuts, or you could chop finely if you're that skilled with a knife. (I am not!) Also, I love lime juice and lime zest, so if you want to add more lime zest go right ahead. I love its clean, bright flavor. I used canola oil for the stir-fry but I gave some thought to using the sesame oil on my shelf. I decided that I didn't want that heavy flavor so I opted for the canola. 

Chock Full Of Nuts

I try not to limit what I eat. I learned a long time ago that being a food snob only makes you look arrogant, foolish, or both. And who wants to sit down to a meal with someone like that? Besides, watching the way my parents handled the tough economic times while I was growing up in the 1970s taught me a lot about how to make the most out of a little in my kitchen today. From that experience I also learned that even the most meager offerings taste better when shared with people you love. (Well, at least most things do!) 

So I try to approach food with an "Eat fearlessly" motto. And that's why I ate peanuts yesterday. I admit that after the salmonella scare I avoided them for a few months. After all, my credo is "Eat fearlessly," not "Eat foolishly." But I had an idea for a recipe mash-up, and peanuts were an ingredient essential to its success - I wanted to put a Thai twist on Chinese long beans. In addition I wanted to break in my new wok. 

The peanuts I had were contaminant-free, and the recipe came together nicely. I'll post it in the near future. In the meantime, this seemed like a good opportunity to segue into posting my article from the Progressive Populist that ran in the previous issue. 

Here's the link. And here's the text. (Hopefully the text will only appear once. It seems to keep doubling up in the template's preview.)

Peanut Butter and Privatizing Food Safety

By Steven Gdula

“The trusting confidence of the American public in the efficiency of laws was never more clearly shown nor more grossly betrayed than in the matter of food inspection.”

So said one George W. Wickersham of the National Civil Service Reform League when asked by journalists to comment on his investigation of the habits of U.S. food inspectors — in 1933. Wickersham’s quote came from the best selling book 100,000,000 Guinea Pigs, an exposé that warned the American public about the dangers lurking in the food it was eating. The authors, Arthur Kallet and Frederick Schlink, became heroes for blowing the whistle on the lax performance by people who were supposed to be watchful of the foods packaged and sold to the American people.

Schlink and Kallet later had even greater success with their periodical, Consumer Union Reports, a precursor to Consumer Reports. With the country facing tough economic times, Consumer Union Reports garnered trust by scrutinizing packaged foods in a “test kitchen” through “scientific means,” and then warning consumers of potential hazards of ingesting the preservatives and additives they found. Each product was assigned a rating of “Best Buy,” “Also Acceptable” or “Not Acceptable.”

The authors picked up the fight for food safety at the point where they believed the government had failed, most notably in the implementation of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. Schlink and Kallet called the Act “feeble and ineffective.”

The law’s aim was that by holding companies accountable for the contents of their packages — by forcing them to label each package’s ingredients—the food industry would refrain from selling potentially harmful foods to the American public. The ever-present threat that the government could inspect the disclosures of the labels for accuracy would force food manufacturers to police themselves.

Schlink and Kallet saw how futile such a law was then, and as the recent tragic deaths and illnesses caused by salmonella-contaminated peanut products have shown, food inspection laws and the agency that enforce them are ineffective now. Even inspectors from the private sector often overlook the actual food products, focusing on the cleanliness of the machinery that packages them. As a result, a plant can receive a high score giving the impression of an immaculate operation even when dangerous bacteria are present.

Certainly Stewart Parnell, the top executive at The Peanut Corporation of America, who according to documents, knowingly sent out the tainted peanuts, didn’t fear the efficiency of any of these inspection entities, otherwise his salmonella-tainted products would never have shipped.

Coming little more than a year after salmonella-tainted jalapeno peppers sickened over 1200 people, the peanut fiasco has again shifted attention in Washington to the call for a single government agency to oversee the inspection of foods. Ten years ago, in 1999 the General Accounting Office (as the Government Accountability Office was then known) authored a report the title of which succinctly stated the problem: “US Needs A Single Agency to Administer a Unified, Risk-Based Inspection System.” Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) and Representative Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) have proposed that a new, single entity take on the combined authority and regulatory enforcement that is currently split between the Food And Drug Administration and the Department of Agriculture.

The creation of such an agency would have made great use of some of the moneys in President Obama’s economic stimulus package. But while some of that cash has already put furloughed police back on the streets, a lag time in other cases of anywhere from three months to over a year exists before the financial aid reaches its intended recipients. With that type of window, the question of “if” further contamination occurs becomes “when.”

Historically, laws regulating food safety have been created in response to a loud public outcry after a tragedy or scandal. The Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act of 1938 was signed into law when Schlink and Kallet showed where the government had failed. The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, which the 1938 Act overhauled, only came about after investigative pieces in Good Housekeeping Magazine, among others, informed readers of the germs and filth characterizing so many meat markets. (The horrific conditions of meat-packing plants and slaughterhouses described in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, also released in 1906, have been said to have influenced then-President Theodore Roosevelt’s urging of The Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act.)

With lives at stake, it’s time to reexamine the proposal by Durbin, DeLauro and the GAO to eliminate two existing agencies by creating a new one, and one of the first places to start would be looking at the cost; not of forming such an agency but of what the agency would charge for giving a food product the all clear. The government needs to make the process of receiving certification more affordable. And that process has to include not only the manufacturing plant but the food supplier servicing it as well.

Private auditors can charge as little as $1,000 to inspect a plant while the F.D.A. charges $8,000. Now, when faced with that type of disparity in fees, and when food-manufacturing plants have contracted the private auditor that is inspecting them rather than being assigned one by a government monitoring agency, and when they’re writing the check for the inspector’s services, we’re expecting a high degree of integrity from both parties. There’s no placing of value on a human life, but it sure seems like the going rate is somewhere around seven grand.

Steven Gdula lives in San Francisco, Calif.

From The Progressive Populist, April 1, 2009