Green Beans With Impossible Pork

Recipe is adapted from a recipe in the excellent book of Japanese home style recipes, "Everyday Harumi." Really the main thing I changed was making it a bit more of a Szechuan flavor profile by adding some prickly ash oil and omitting the sesame oil.

Ingredients

3 cups of green beans

one small leek or couple of scallions, chopped into thin slices

1/2 oz. fresh ginger, peeled and finely chopped

2 cloves of garlic, finely chopped

7 oz. Impossible pork, spicy variety (could also use real ground pork if you like)

3 Tbsp. soy sauce (Pearl River Bridge if you can find it)

2 tsp. prickly ash oil (Szechuan peppercorn oil)

Shichimi togarashi or dried pepper flakes (I really like the Trader Joe's dried Hatch chile flakes in this dish)

Recipe

There are two ways you could prepare the beans. I personally like to sous vide them, but you could also blanch them for a few minutes before sauteing.

1. Cut beans in half, or smaller if you prefer more bite-sized pieces

2. If blanching the beans, cook them in salted boiling water for 3 minutes, and then strain them and stop their cooking by placing them in a bath of ice water

3. If cooking the beans sous vide, cook them according to the timing and temperature in the sous vide green bean method. I actually like to also throw about half the soy sauce, ginger, garlic, leeks, and prickly ash oil into the bag and sous vide them all at once.

4. Add some neutral oil (I normally use avocado oil but any kind of oil is fine) to a skillet, and over medium heat, cook the garlic, ginger, and leek for a minute to infuse their flavors into the oil

5. Add the pork to the oil and stir fry until the meat is well browned on all sides

6. Add the green beans to the pan as well as the soy sauce and prickly ash oil and add as much of the pepper flake as you can stand

7. Saute everything in the skillet until the beans are warmed through and the beans have just started to blister a bit from the oil and heat

8. Serve with steamed white rice