Yesterday I went to the Columbia City Farmers Market in search of a chicken, and I came home with the chicken, some tomatoes, skinny green beans (you really can’t say *haricots verts* without sounding like a dick, can you?), squash blossoms, and tomatillos. Clearly I’m a tomatillo addict. Put me in front of a box of them, especially purple ones with snug husks, and I’ll buy them even if I already have a bunch at home. But this story isn’t about tomatillos. It’s about beans.

I also spent a little time showing farmers market pioneer Nina Planck (former director of the NYC Greenmarkets) around. Progress was admirably slow. She would stop at a stand (admiring, say, the lettuces at Tolt River Farm) and indicate her approval. This happened at nearly every stand. I’ve seen it before. You bring someone someone from another part of the country and get them up close and personal with Northwest produce, and they won’t want to go home. I say this like Nina Planck and I are buddies, but this was the first time we’d met, and I liked her enough that I will feel mildly guilty about posting critical (along with favorable) things about her book tomorrow.

Tonight, I made what I think constitutes a classic bistro salad. I blanched the skinny beans in heavily salted water and shocked them in ice water. I set them aside while I made the dressing. I diced some Nueske’s and crisped it up in a pan. Added some olive oil because there wasn’t quite enough fat. I minced shallots and toasted sliced almonds in the fat, then added a dash of cider vinegar to make it a vinaigrette. (Why cider vinegar? I thought it might help it go better with the enchiladas. It didn’t, really, but it was still good.) Dried the beans, tossed them with the warm dressing and a little pepper, and we were all set. Iris ate the almonds and bacon and did not condescend to try a green bean. Even Gloria of Bread and Jam for Frances fame likes to practice with a string bean when she can.

The salad was great, but I wondered how to get the dressing to integrate with the beans a little better. I think I just found the answer. I remembered having a similar salad at Pike Place Market’s Café Campagne, which was topped with lovely slices of grilled bacon. According to the menu, it is:

*Haricots verts marinated with lemon vinaigrette and shallots, topped with grilled bacon*

Marinated, hmm. I guess next week I’ll be buying more–sorry to be a dick about it–*haricots verts*.

We drink tea. Not as much as the English people we know, but a couple of cups a day. Our favorite tea is PG Tips, which is the bestselling tea in England. It’s about what you would expect of the bestselling tea in England: unthreatening. It’s smooth and not very tannic. The second-bestselling tea in England, Typhoo, is very tannic. I guess it’s like the choice between red delicious and granny smith apples.

Sometimes I flirt with other teas. I tend to order lapsang souchong, the smoked tea, whenever I see it on a cafe menu, because I’m not allowed to make it in the teapot at home: it makes the next six pots of tea smokehouse-fresh. But I always come back to the familiar flavor of PG Tips.

That’s why I was excited about [Amazon Grocery](http://amazon.com/grocery/). Thanks to Grocery and one of the Amazon Prime free trials they’ve been giving out, we got six boxes of Tips (240 bags) for about half what we would have paid at the supermarket. Then I got all excited. “If we can save 50 percent on tea, think of all the other savings we will achieve through Amazon Grocery. We will have that pony in no time.” The pony does not qualify for Amazon Prime, but millions of other great products do!

So I spent half an hour browsing and turned up absolutely nothing else I wanted. Not microwave popcorn. Not lavender dishwashing detergent. Not La Tempesta Grande Biscotti (almond, semi-crunchy). I believe “La Tempesta Grande” is Italian for “the perfect storm.”

If you’re in England, I assume 240 bags of PG Tips is a week’s supply. Then again, if you’re in England, you don’t have Amazon Grocery.

First, I have no idea whether to use the spelling “kebab” or “kabob.” I will switch randomly.

Second, I didn’t eat any kebabs. Be forewarned.

My friend Liza told me a mouthwarming story about how people showed up late to her cookout with a bunch of Whole Foods kebabs. Sadly for them, the propane tank was cashed, so Liza appropriated the kabobs.

This made me especially jealous because I’ve never had those Whole Foods kebabs, and they look really good. Every time I go past the kabob counter, which always features a few employees threading and marinating kebabs, I say to myself, “Hey, those look really good, but I’m not going to pay some guy a 100 percent markup to thread kabobs when I can do it myself.”

How many times have I actually done it myself? Zero.

I don’t have a grill, but next time I go to Whole Foods I am going to buy some kabobs and broil them, and we are going to like it.