For some people I know the sign of high summer is greens scavenged from the roadside, but for me it’s tomatoes, especially the misshapen heirloom varieties grown by farmer-cum-tomato-memoirist Tim Stark. As those tomatoes start getting abundant we start eating them for breakfast, cut up in a bowl with salt and olive oil and scooped up with pieces of crusty bread. My wife started doing this when she was cooking in Greece during culinary school; before I met her it hadn’t occurred to me that one might reasonably have tomatoes at three meals a day, but my life is better for it.
But the hot, humid weather that tomatoes love is kind of oppressive in the city. That makes cooking less appealing, and about this time of year we start making another dish Tara learned in Greece, this one from her baby-sitting charges Stella and Eleni. Cut up an onion roughly and soften it over medium heat in olive oil. Add some tomatoes, cut up (if you’re a grownup) or smooshed through your fingers (if you’re six). Add a big pile of fat green beans (broad romanos are great), tipped and tailed; bring the mixture to a fast simmer; and cover it. Then turn down the heat and leave it to cook for at least an hour. I was horrified the first time Tara did this: “The beans are going to be wildly overcooked! You’ll ruin them! ” “Ha!” she told me. “The first time we did this in Greece, Stella and Eleni’s mom left this on the stove in a pressure cooker while we went to the market for three hours. Don’t worry.”
It turns out that cooking the hell out of green beans is a pretty great idea—they’re less alive, but a lot more like beans. We eat them with our fingers, warm or at room temperature, with a huge chunk of salty feta, spicy olive oil, and a crunchy semolina loaf. We eat them slowly with a glass of crisp white wine, unhurried food for a long, hot summer evening.
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