Beans?

As I mentioned in my previous post, we're being inundated with some of our veggies.....French beans in particular.  They're growing almost faster than we can pick them, and because some of them get hidden by the masses of leaves (husband planted them quite close together), some are huge and thick by the time we spot them.  Well, they're not very nice to eat by that time, the pods get stringy and tough.  So I'm wondering whether I can pod them and just cook and eat the beans.  I don't see why not, after all, all kinds of beans in tins started off in pods!  I'll give it a go in the next few days.**

We didn't think we'd get much of a good harvest of anything this year, it was such a disastrous start to the growing year as it was so wet, windy and cold in Spring.  Lots of our first sowings of veg seeds failed, even some of the second sowings, and quite a few seedlings we bought to try and catch up died off too.  But pretty much everything has not only caught up, but done extremely well.  Oh, except for the strawberries and blueberries, we didn't get as many of either of those this year, although the blackcurrants and raspberries have done well.  We're going to pick most of our apples (eating apple Fiesta, cooking apple Bountiful) this weekend, even if not quite ready - they're being decimated by wasps and I don't want to lose all of them.

Husband wanted southern fried chicken and chips tonight, I've been trying to avoid too many carbs this week for gut reasons so it will be interesting to see if the chicken coating and the chips have any adverse effects on me.  I'll just have a few chips (I will eat the chicken coating, it's the best bit!) and will make coleslaw to have with it.  We had a very thin base pizza last night, spinach and ricotta with sun dried tomatoes, I had about a third of the medium size pizza and left the crusts, to reduce the carbs, we had it with lots of salad.  No gut trouble, thankfully.

**EDIT  I've googled and found that yes you can eat the podded beans, but they should be boiled rapidly first (rather like dried kidney beans), as when older and bigger they contain a chemical that could give you stomach upset.  A recommendation was that you just pod and freeze the beans raw, then boil them for 10 mins from frozen, then cook a bit longer until soft.