Delicious Thai flavors infuse this dish of long beans and pork.

We’ve been eating a lot of yard-long beans at house of Annie lately. They are a hardy bean and are full of protein and vitamins. We eat them almost once a week in this house.

One of the reasons I love them is that they keep very well in the fridge. I find that now that I live in very hot, humid Kuching, a lot of my green leafy vegetables spoil faster than when we lived in California. And now that I’m working, I have less time to shop for groceries—this means I have to buy most of my veggies on the weekend when I have time to market. Being hardy, the long beans are my go-to vegetable near the end of the week when I’ve cooked up all the leafy vegetables.

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This is one of those slap-dash dishes that turned out better than expected.

Pork with Leeks and Basil

This dish came about one day when I looked into my fridge and realized I had a little bit of this and a little bit of that left that needed to be used up. I had a couple leftover leeks from the leek and potato soup I made. And I also had some Thai basil and green onions left over from the last time I made larb. With all these random herbs and greens in my fridge (including some red chillies), I decided I would do something that would use it all up in one dish.

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Interchangeable ingredients, crunchy counterpoints: an orchestra of flavors that can lead to overeating!

If you have never tried Thai larb, you really have to. It’s not really too hard to make and the ingredients are so interchangeable. And of course the flavors are distinctly Thai—a little sweet, a little sour, a little spicy and a little salty. Which is everything you need to lead to overeating! Thankfully, the dish itself is quite healthy with the amount of green herbs in it that you can justify the overeating.

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Elizabeth and I have been friends since high school. Our friendship was not the most immediate—she is naturally more suspicious and takes a long time to warm up to people. I, on the other hand, will talk to just about anyone who is near me. So the first time we met, I had come up to her to say hello and ask her name only to be met with a suspicious, “why do you want to know?” At least, this is what Elizabeth tells me. I don’t remember that at all. I only know that we’ve been good friends for a long time. We’ve been through years of sitting next to each other through high school, work (graduate school for me), and of course, FOOD.

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