Swiss Green Beans and Maple-Mustard Salmon

I think I'm in love with Mollie Katzen. She writes the best cookbooks - both the Moosewood Cookbook and The Enchanted Broccoli Forest contain tons and tons if inventive, delicious, vegetarian recipes. The following recipe is just slighty adapted based on what was in my kitchen.

1.5 lbs green beans, trimmed and steamed for 3 minutes
2 large garlic cloves, minced
1 tsp dried tarragon
1 tsp dried dill
o.5 tsp salt
black pepper to tast
2 tsp dijon mustard
0.5 c fresh parsley, minced
0.33 ob swiss cheese, cut in matchsticks
0.5 c ripe olives (we used oil-cured, but kalamata would be good too. whatever you do, don't used the tasteless canned ones)
1 red bell pepper, sliced
juice of one lemon
1 tbs red wine vinegar
0.5 c chopped almonds

Toss it all together and let it sit 2-3 hours. If you combine all but the lemon juice and vinegar in order to let it marinade longer, say overnight, it tastes even better and you can add that right before serving. This keeps the acid in the lemon and the vinegar from turning the beans from bright green to army green.

To go with this, Bill whipped up a quick sauce for salmon burgers: equal parts maple syrup and mustard (the quality of the mustard matters - we used our fave, Maille), with chopped garlic and green onions, all sauteed for a bit. It's even better on salmon steaks, but burgers is what we had on hand. Our friend Gina introduced us to this sauce, and we've used it a bunch of times since. It's somethign we would never have thought of, yet is very easy and made entirely of ingredients we always have on hand.

Kiwi Tart

Boston Organics has been sending us more kiwis than we know what to do with. I used up six in this easy recipe (it says three, but I cut the kiwi in thick slices and overlapped a bunch). One modification: I used the 1/3 less fat cream cheese rather than the regular stuff.

Banana Coconut Muffins

Epicurious is such a great resource. We had overripe bananas last night, so I looked for a banana muffin recipe and found this one, which turned out incredibly tasty, much better than the picture.