Crescent Dragonwagon

I’d tell you to stick a Post-It right here because, once you try these, you’ll be making them often -- but they’re simple enough that after one time through, you’ll probably remember how to make them forever. These green beans are cooked to falling-apart-ness in what’s essentially a garlic-tomato confit. Every bite is imbued with flavor -- garlicky, a little hot, meltingly tender; the kind of good that, with your first bite, you close your eyes and grow silent.

Okay, here you are: This is my single favorite go-to, home-cooking, just-us-folks, one-dish meal. I make it all the time —at least once a week, my vast bean (and other) culinary appreciation and repertoire notwithstanding. If, growing tired of coming up with the nightly menu, I say to my companion, "Anything in particular you're in the mood for, David?" I can be pretty sure he'll say, "Well, how about the greens and beans and pasta? We haven't had that in a while." That we actually have had it is irrelevant; it's that good.

I swooned the first time I made this. What makes it exceptional? It's hearty, deeply flavorful, lapped in a rich, glossy, savory sauce, spiked with red wine—serious wintertime satisfaction in a bowl. It is everything you want from a stew, from the seductive aroma with which it warms the house as it simmers, to its robust, filling substance and big, distinct ("manly," we might have said in pre-feminist days) chunks of potato and other vegetables. Dried shiitakes absorb the ragout; garlic (and no wimpy amount of it, either) is used almost as a vegetable in its own right. And, though it seems impossible that something so stalwart should be low fat, low fat it is.