Roulés de jambon aux haricots verts

Trying to be creative with green beans — here's something delicious and pleasing to the eye too. It's green beans wrapped in very thin slices of ham and cooked with tomato sauce, onions, bell pepper strips, and cheese.

You start with cooked green beans and slices of what is called jambon de Paris, or boiled ham. Sandwich ham. You could also use thin slices of turkey or chicken, or even crepes or tortillas instead of meat. Put the cooked beans on a ham slice...

...and wrap the beans around the bunch of beans. I had four slices of ham and about a pound of beans, which I had cooked in a steamer. Put some tomato sauce into the bottom of a baking dish and set the ham roll-ups on top.

To make the dish more interesting, I cooked up some sliced onion and shallot along with some frozen bell pepper strips. Here in France, you can get these nice tri-color pepper strips in the Picard chain of frozen food centers. You could use fresh peppers of course.

Arrange the partially cooked peppers around the edges of the baking dish, and add a little more tomato sauce if you want. Cover everything with grated cheese (Comté or another Swiss-type cheese, and some Parmesan, for example). Cook it for 15 or 20 minutes in a hot oven to melt the cheese and brown the top slightly.

Here's what it looks like when you cut into a roulé de jambon. Nice, no?