Great Greek green beans!

Three years ago, BE, we both went to the first Crete-Princeton Reading Group in, er, Crete. Crete is well-known for its cuisine, and it's true that we ate very well. Voula kindly gave us this book at the end of the trip:

The recipes all look delicious, some of them for Greek classics such as Moussaka, Soutzoukakia, Smoked Pork (something I remember really well from Crete), but also some less well-known dishes such as 'brawn made from a pig's head', 'snails with wheat grains', 'lamb with hylopites' (sounds like a nasty venereal disease). We had already discovered with this cookbook that you can find yourself dealing with a recipe which gives you little guidance: we had done courgette fritters (kolokithokeftedes) and stuffed vegetables (gemistes) for a Greek evening after that Cretan trip, and ended up making up most of those recipes...

This time, we did Greek-style green beans:

Start by chopping onion and parsley (parsley was our addition): 

 Then prepare 500g of fresh tomatoes - I blanched, peeled, and chopped them:

Then, wonderfully, put half a cup of olive oil in a pan (I think I cut back to about 1/3 cup because we had fewer beans that the recipe specified):

Followed by the onions:

Sauté (for how long? it doesn't say) and add beans, then (when? straightaway?) the tomatoes:

Then cook for 45 minutes, adding (if wished) some potatoes at the halfway mark:

To go with our beans, we had grilled marinated chicken breasts, Italian style:

 Here is the finished plate, complete with an oil slick that would make BP proud:

 We also had bread and olives on the side, to heighten the Greek feeling:

The bean dish was good, but the potatoes were not really done enough. Next time, I think I'll do the dish in a smaller pan, so that the potatoes are fully submerged while they are cooking. And I'll probably cook the whole dish longer than the recommended 45 minutes. And I'll substitute lamb for the beans (just kidding on that last one).