Voila!

And so it was! I took Ali Edward's weekend creativity challenge to use PhotoShop to add type to a photo -- nothing earth-shattering, but I thought it worked in this case so there you go. And despite the softness of this picture, I love it for the purity of Dean's joy that it shows.

Whew! Birthday party was yesterday, and while we'll be finishing up cake and extending birthday leniency for a few more days this one is a wrap. All good. We now re-join our usual lives, already in progress. Lots of housework to catch up on (always) and projects to get back to.

I tried a new recipe that gave amazing results for very little effort (my favorite kind) and can tell you honestly that if you or someone you feed is NOT a green bean fan, this preparation just might change everything. The original recipe calls for this to be a room temperature salad, but you could easily leave out the radicchio and serve the vegetables hot as a side dish.

Roasted Green Bean and Potato [Salad or Side] With {or Without} Radicchio (Adapted from Cook's illustrated magazine of March 2008)

1 lb. green beans washed and trimmed and cut to about 1 inch pieces
1 lb. red bliss or other small red new potatoes, scrubbed and cut in half or quarters
3 tablespoons olive oil
salt and pepper to taste
1/4 teaspoon sugar
2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
1 small minced garlic clove
1 small head radicchio, washed in cut into strips (optional)

Place an oven rack at the lowest point in oven, place large rimmed baking sheet on rack, and preheat oven to 500 f. Mix up the oil, salt, pepper, sugar, vinegar, and garlic in a large bowl, and toss beans and potatoes in there until they are coated. Use a slotted spoon to carefully transfer the vegetables on to the now blazing hot baking sheet and save the bowl with the bit of oil mix left in it. Spread the vegetables to a single layer and roast about 20 minutes (do not stir them once on the sheet). Keep a watch -- mine were totally done at 20 minutes.

Carefully transfer your beautifully browned, roasted vegetables back into the bowl and toss in whatever remains in the bottom of the bowl. Now here's where you have options. You could add in the radicchio and stir it up so that the heat of the vegetables wilts the radicchio, and then you could serve it hot or let it cool down to room temp. You could just serve the potatoes and beans without the radicchio. The original recipe calls for letting the vegetables cool and THEN adding the radicchio, but we found this weird (the lettuce was way too crispy to pair with the vegetables) -- the radicchio needs to wilt down and "cook" by the heat of the roasted stuff in our opinion.

Regardless, though, if you've never roasted a green bean I do believe you are in for a treat.