So, let’s start with the basics: I have a 2 years, 8 months, and 23 days old daughter. This figure was generated by a bit of code I wrote because I’m the sort of person who tries to game the system with crap solutions and paperclips, only to often watch my plans backfire.
And what a perfect segue that is into today’s experiment, a misguided enterprise straight out of the food&home section of Gwyneth Paltrow’s boho hellscape Goop: pure green bean essence.
Picture it: a farmhouse kitchen steeped in chiaroscuro and sepia tones, work-roughened hands squeezing the water out of a cloth full of a mysterious substance that makes it balloon and fart loudly (But the audio doesn’t capture that. What you get instead is a gravelly male voice slowly narrating the process: “Here at Camilla Monk, we believe in the simple strength of nature; that’s why we’ve been extracting our green bean essence by hand with traditional methods for 500 years.”)
All right, let’s delve into how I ended up covering my kitchen in green bean juice out of a disproportionate sense of concern for a child who honestly doesn’t deserve me. So, I make most of her food myself (No, I don’t catch the salmon. Shut up, Rebecca!), and today, I had a bag full of green beans, some frozen peas in the fridge, and a head full of dreams of making a tray of green bean purée for next week.
Why purée? Because the child, despite having nearly all of her teeth at just 16 months (and sharp teeth they are), is loathe to eat anything resembling textured or hard food. Except when it’s Babybel cheese, fish, grilled chicken, dark chocolate, or sourdough bread with jam . . . She’s gaslighting me, isn’t she? Anyway: any type of roughly mashed vegetable? Get out. Peas purée with maybe some skins left in it? What is this, Ukraine?
It, therefore, went without saying that this purée would need to be smooth as a botoxed forehead. Problem: those green beans we get from the grocery store tend to be a bit tough, and the sweet peas I thought to add for thickening and flavor have SKINS. I cooked my veggies, added some salt butter, and whipped out my immersion blender. The resulting paste was a disaster. Grainier than found footage; grainier than couscous, and something I knew The Child would not touch it with a ten-foot pole.
I then summoned my mini food processor, whose “purée” mode has saved me more than once. TO NO AVAIL. My green bean purée was still grittier than 300, and I was getting nowhere fast. I needed to do something, and I had just the solution: my small, trusty food bullet, whose unmatched power is normally reserved for the silkiest of smoothies. New problem, though: my bullet has never performed well with thicker food, and requires the addition of enough liquid to turn purées into, well, smoothies. So I added a liberal amount of milk and water to my green gunk.
Camilla used bullet; it’s super effective! Finally, after a lengthy session of blending small amounts of adequately diluted green crap, I was able to achieve the sort of smooth, creamy texture The Child craves. Except, try getting a toddler to eat a smoothie with a spoon. I double dare you. I could see only one way out of this (Bear in mind that, at that point, I have already used three different types of blending apparatus, and my kitchen looked like a warzone): I would squeeze out the excess liquid using a cheesecloth until the desired consistency was achieved.
Well, I had no cheesecloth.
An old cotton pillowcase belonging to The Child would do! I made sure it had been washed and stored long enough ago that it no longer smelled conspicuously of softener (and therefore wouldn’t transfer any weird smell to my purée) before I poured my green bean smoothie into it as cleanly as I could (it was a total mess.) I then began the gruesome process of slowly twisting the cloth until a cloudy, greenish liquid trickled out. And that’s how I found myself attempting to make pure green bean essence above my sink, spraying bean juice all over the counter, my clothes, and a mounting pile of dishes.
And you know what? The result isn’t even that great. I must have over-squeezed or something and left the realm of purée for that of pure extract paste. Oh well, that’s what’s for dinner, and if The Child doesn’t eat it, Mr. Monk will.