Sunday 14 April 2013

Naked Babies in the Grass Recipe (Naakte Kindertjes in Het Gras)


Have you ever come across a dish with a cuter name? If you have I want you to tell me about it in the comments! This Dutch dish is called Naakte Kindertjes in Het Gras - which translates as Naked Babies in the Grass. I'll admit, the adorable name is the main reason I decided to feature this dish. It's a simple but satisfying dish, well suited to being a side dish or an addition to a buffet or potluck. You can see where it gets it's name right? The little white beans are like tiny babies nestled amongst very tall grass.

You can make this dish using any small white beans, such as navy, great northern or cannelini beans. I guess if you wanted to make it with lima beans you could call it Fat Naked Babies in the Grass! What I'm putting up here are some rough quantities, as you don't really need to follow the recipe too closely. I made a fairly big quantity as I was serving it up at a dinner party, so you'll probably want to halve it to make a side dish for a family of four. Use whatever quantities you like!

Now tell me - what is the most adorably named dish you have ever come across??

Ingredients
300g dried white beans, soaked for 24 hours
500g green beans, trimmed and cut in half
2 tbsp vegan margarine (Nuttelex)
Salt and Pepper to taste

To Make
1. Soak the white beans for 24 hours and then drain and rinse. Place in a large pot and cover with plenty of water. Bring to a boil and boil until cooked (times may vary between different types of beans - but I used cannelini beans and it took about 50 minutes).
2. In the last 10 minutes of cooking add the green beans so that they'll be just tender but still a bit crunchy.
3. While they're cooking. Heat up your serving bowl with some boiling hot water.
4. Drain the beans and tip the water out of your serving bowl.
5. Add the hot beans, Nuttelex and generous amounts of salt and pepper to the warm bowl and toss it all together. Serve straight away (if you have to make it it advance, make sure you heat it up before serving to make sure the Nuttelex is properly melted).

Serves 8-12 as a side dish.


I entered this dish into the Vegan Virtual Linky Potluck.


This month I'm featuring lots of delicious food from The Netherlands.
Check out my other Dutch recipe posts:

3 comments:

  1. Hi Keely, funny: I'm Dutch and most of these dishes are completely new to me. I'm gonna try them, though! You got me wondering about Dutch cuisine (most Dutchies will tell you there isn't really anything we can be proud of), but the most Dutch thing i can think of would be the "kroket"
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croquette#Netherlands

    Perhaps you can try a vegan version of that as well.

    Thanks for the great recipes!

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  2. Thanks for the feedback, next time I'll make sure I cut them diagonal. :)

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  3. I like naked babies in the grass better than naked butts ;-)!

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