Green beans Chinese buffet style.

Whats more American than the Chinese buffet? Well, lot’s of things but you know what I mean. J is not huge on the Chinese buffets but me and little Z have made it kind of a tradition when we are spending a daddy daughter day together. In my opinion you can actually make the Chinese buffet a healthy meal if you can control yourself. There are a ton of vegetable dishes to choose from and they usually keep all the fried stuff together so you can just stay away form that particular island. They usually have a dedicated island for fruit and salads too. Now, I know their not using all organic ingredients and there is a ton of oil, sodium and unrefined sugars in there so it’s not something to eat all the time, but the bad rap they get sometimes is not too deserving. Anyway, when we hit the Chinese buffet one of the standards is the green beans. Simple, crispy and in a wonderful little sauce. I grab a claw full on my first round for every time, sometimes even for seconds, I just love em. So in my attempts to recreate all the things I love from restaurants as well as my attempt to get more veggies in our household meals, behold the Chinese buffet style green beans!

On a side note this was my first experience using rapadura/sucanat sugar as opposed to turbinado sugar. I was always under the impression that turbinado (sugar in the RAW) was unrefined but when I started writing a post about sweeteners I realized that what I was using was actually refined after all. So I made the switch to rapadura/sucanat sugar (organic dried whole sugar cane) to replace white sugar in recipes. I’ll go into more depth on this topic in a post sometime in the near future (it’s in the works). While gathering links for this post I also noticed that the Rapunzel brand has a powdered sugar version as well, something I have been thinking about trying to find lately. Me now found, me now happy. You will find links to more info on these products in the recipe ingredients below.