Green Bean Surprise!

What happens when you go digging in the big freezer to find tortillas and you pull everything out only to learn that there are no tortillas in your freezer? If you're like me you go back into the house to tell your husband that there are no tortillas and he tells you that dinner is ready and you sit down to eat and forget all about the food in the garage (which was once in the freezer and now is not) until the next morning when you go out to the car to get something and notice all that food sitting about, outside of the freezer. OOPS.

Yeah, that is sort of what happened last week. Well, more than sort of. That's pretty much exactly what happened last week. Thankfully it had been a cool week, so the food was still cold (a lot of the food was still mostly frozen) and we mostly had things like flour, bread, and cheese that could survive a little thawing and re-freezing without too much harm. I think the ice cream sandwiches suffered the worst of it, but I haven't had the heart to open up the box to see how they fared. I guess we'll find out when I go craving an ice cream sandwich next time.

There were, however, a few items that we chose to use immediately instead of toss back into the freezer, so it was a day of processing and cooking. We had a giant bag of green beans from Costco that I bought a long time ago and had never used, we had a ham that I'd made a couple months ago and frozen half of, there was some chopped vidalia onion waiting to be used, and a couple large bags of blueberries. I made some green bean casserole (my way- not the traditional fried onion and mushroomy way), some fried green beans (which are pretty good!) and I started making some stew with the remainder of the green beans. Leif made 3 batches of homemade blueberry ice cream. Mmm.

I wasn't sure what sort of stew to make with the green beans, but we had some carrots in the fridge, too, so I figured I could make some sort of stew. I dumped the green beans and onions into the crock pot, then saw the ham and decided to chop that up and toss it in too. At this point I decided against the carrots, since I didn't think carrots and ham go together. So I had a crock pot full of green beans, chopped onion, and ham (with a little bit of pineapple, since that is what the ham had originally been cooked in). I added some chicken broth and turned the crock pot on low, hoping to have some yummy stew at the end of the day.

It didn't magically turn into stew.

But it DID turn into some of the best green beans I've ever had! SURPRISE! It was really good! I don't usually eat onion, but this was a good way to eat them. We had them with dinner that night (we ended up having dinner with the neighbors who brought over smoked chicken and baked potatoes) along with some blueberry ice cream. I liked them so much I ate them for breakfast the morning after that! Mmmm.... good green beans.

So there you have it. THAT's what happens when you accidentally let your food thaw out and decide to use it right away. I don't recommend it, but at least the story has a happy ending.