First, there was Tater Tot. Then there was Mini Wheat. Now, there’s Green Bean. 

If you’ve been reading my column for long enough, then you know I just spilled the beans. If you see me in person, then you know I can’t help but spill the beans on sight: Miller Baby #3 is on the way! 

We are of course thrilled, and now that I’m in the second trimester, I can even feel thrilled. My morning sickness could have been far far worse, and though symptoms have been intensifying successively with each pregnancy, I am delighted to now be feeling a wave of relief instead of waves of nausea. I could go back and look at my recipes from the first 14 or 15 weeks (I’m now at 19), but I don’t need to do that to know that my culinary adventurousness plummeted. It is hard to write positively about food when tasting, smelling, or even thinking about any of it results in immediate pervading queasiness.

It’s easy to slide into momentary despair, consigning myself to subsist forever in the odd state of prenatal nausea, a state that seems in my head yet overwhelms my body. But though it isn’t a given, I have gradually, mercifully, slid out of most of the sickness — and it was for a good cause, oh such a good cause, as the child kicking within me likes to remind me. 

Brian and I always joke that I will crave “normal people” food when I’m pregnant, and so far that has been somewhat the case. I always have far more aversions than cravings, but I tend to have at least biases towards foods I wouldn’t typically have a particular affinity for. 

While growing Benson, I suddenly found potatoes remarkably appealing. I don’t dislike potatoes in general, I just am a preposterous Midwesterner who rarely finds any reason to eat them. Unless, of course, I’m pregnant, and then I’ll take them in any and every form — hence the nickname Tater Tot for our first child in utero. 

With Kiah, I turned some major corners and discovered the epicurean joy of soggy Mini Wheats. I (used to) have this thing with cereal that I have to eat it in successive segments, pouring just enough each time so that it doesn’t have time to get soggy. Yet what cereal has the potential to become the absolute soggiest of all in seconds? Mini Wheats. I used to pour then-two-year-old Benson more than I knew he would eat just so I could have the excuse to put it in the fridge and to eat in a couple hours: squidgy, gloopy, blobby, delectable Mini Wheats. Appropriately, it’s our Mini-Wheat-christened baby’s all-time favorite cereal. 

While I’m just getting back into wanting to eat food while carrying this third treasure, I am mildly obsessed with green beans, and they are one of the few foods I have been able to look at this whole time. By now, I’ll gladly eat them in any form: fresh, frozen, raw, straight outta a can. I am rarely a plain-steamed-veg kind of person, but it is hard to think of anything more delicious than those green beans in steamable bags that pop right into the microwave. I microwaved some yesterday and the kids both walked around with handfuls of plain green beans at lunch and again as snack, so at least I’m not the only weirdo around here. 

But hey, it’s for the baby, right. We love green beans, but we really really love our little Green Bean.

Small-Scale Cater-Style Green Beans

There’s a certain style of green bean that often shows up at catered meals. The ticket seems to be inordinate amounts of bacon and brown sugar, but I’m really into some sharper flavors right now too, so I tried to find a good in-between. Normally I am 100% on team fresh/frozen green bean, but even storebought canned ones are like candy right now, with or without the fancifying of this recipe.

Prep tips: I definitely didn’t/probably didn’t/might not have/might have drank the drained bean juice. Judge not, lest ye be judged.

a good dollop of bacon fat or butter

• 1 small onion, minced

• 2 [14.5 ounce] cans green beans, drained 

• ½ tablespoon dijon mustard

• ½ tablespoon apple cider vinegar

• 1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce

• 1-2 teaspoons brown sugar

• salt and pepper to taste

Heat fat in a medium skillet; add onion and saute until translucent. Add in remaining ingredients, simmer for a few minutes, and adjust seasoning to taste. 

Lettuce Eat Local is a weekly local foods column by Amanda Miller, who lives in rural Reno County on the family dairy farm with her husband and two small children. She seeks to help build connections through food with her community, the earth, and the God who created it all. Send feedback and recipe ideas to hyperpeanutbutter@gmail.com.