Priya's 20-Minute Green Bean and Potato Sabzi | NYT Cooking

Hot. This is my cross to bear, which is I never wait for food to cool down, so I just live in a permanent state of burnt tongue. It's fine. Hi, my name is Priya. We are in the New York Times Studio kitchen, and today we are making my crispy green bean and potato subzi. Subzis are like basically the bedrock of my cooking. It is vegetables that have been seasoned and flavored and super powered. Hearty potatoes, snappy green beans. It's got the spices, it's got the acid, it's got the richness. If you're a slow cook, you can make this in 20 minutes. If you are cruising, you could probably make this in 10 minutes. That's not a selling point for dinner. I don't know what is. I'm always thinking like, how can I make a subzi feel like a full meal? And one day I was at home, my mom was cooking dinner, and I tasted the subzi she'd made, and it tasted like nuttier, more filling, more hearty. And I was like, what did you do? And she was like, I put a spoonful of almond butter at the end. And it was like, like blew my mind. The first thing you wanna do is brown your potatoes. So we're gonna put the oil in a pan, zhuzh that around a little bit, add your potatoes. This is really the hardest part for me in cooking, which is putting something in a pan and not messing with it. Why is that so hard? The key to these potatoes getting nice and brown is literally just like set it and forget it. So put your potatoes in, make sure your heat is appropriately high, and salt them with half of your salt, and then forget about it. Isn't that the official slogan of Brooklyn? I feel like I've driven along the BQE and seen that sign. Just gonna let these cook for like a couple of minutes. Yeah, I'm just waiting. There's really nothing you can do. Maybe cut your green beans, mince your garlic, mince your ginger. Pans, sadly, have hot spots, so you might need to just... These are great. Oh, look at that beautiful browning. By distracting ourselves for just a few minutes, we got that nice crust. All right, add our green beans, the rest of the salt, and I'm gonna add a little bit more salt because it doesn't seem like this is enough salt. Give those a toss. Oops, water. And this is just to create a little bath for the beans. Let these cook for a couple of minutes. We're in the homestretch, folks. Okay, I have a feeling this will probably be done. Yeah, they're good. This is all cooked. I'm gonna give it a little bit more salt, and now we're gonna add our spices and aromatics, pepper, cumin, coriander, and I would strongly recommend, if you can, mash these in a mortar and pestle and get a nice coarse ground. That's gonna be better than the powdered stuff. Starting with whole, always better. I'm just an evangelist for whole spices. Ginger and garlic. Be generous. I like adding the ginger and garlic toward the end of the recipe because I find that it gives a little bit more brightness and freshness rather than garlic that you cooked at the beginning and then layered flavors on top of that. I'm now adding my ginger garlic toward the end of cooking, and I'm into it. This is nice and mixed, and now for the magic ingredient, our almond butter. I'm using almond butter. You can use peanut butter. You can use probably cashew butter. I think any nut butter will work. I've only used peanut butter and almond butter, but try the other butters. Let me know what you think. Pistachio butter might be a little weird, but you know, it could work, and then you're just gonna basically melt the nut butter into the subzi. It'll sort of just wilt and submit to the subzi, and you wanna just slowly toss it and let it coat everything. It's gonna make this really nice, crispy, delicious coating. The almond butter just goes whoop in the pan. I also love that the almond butter creates these clumps of flavor, so you get a clump of ginger and garlic and coriander as you're eating it. All right, so I'm just gonna give this a little taste for seasoning. I'm gonna add just a little touch more salt. Give this a toss. Lime juice. If you're me, you'll add the full half. If you are more acid-averse, do as you please. If you taste a subzi and you're like, oh man, this is a little more lackluster than I thought, just add chaat masala, J-A-C-M. That is my cardinal rule for sort of spicing up anything that just needs a little bit of energy. If you're not familiar with chaat masala, it is one of my all-time favorite spice blends. It's funky, it's salty, it's got a lot of depth. I like it because it gives you kind of salt and tart flavors and spicy flavors all in one. And that is pretty much it. All right, it's delicious. Cut, wrap it. We're good to go. We've cooked our green beans, we've plated them. I've added even more chaat masala. You can eat these with roti or rice. I love fresh roti, swiped with some butter or ghee. That is how I grew up having the subzi, and that's how I'm gonna eat it now. Let's take a little piece. Mm, mm, give me a minute. This is just such a good standby. You literally could make this your entire dinner if you wanted to. One thing that I have done that I think would be really great is to turn these leftovers into breakfast tacos. Scramble some eggs, a little salt and pepper, wrap this up, a little salsa. Salsa verde would taste delicious with this. Mm, anything else? Oh, right, for more recipes like this and a trove of other brilliant ways to solve your weeknight dinner dilemma, you can head to NYT Cooking.