This recipe is excerpted from "Smitten Kitchen Keepers," the October 2024 Book of the Month in the Food52 Cookbook Club.
Sometimes I daydream about writing a cookbook entirely devoted to ways you can doctor up a can of beans. It’s usually during lunch on a weekday, which on all of the days when I’m not working on a wildly successful, ready-by-1:00-p.m. recipe that I don’t need to save for dinner—that would be just about all of the days—is highly likely to be a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. When I do make time for experimentation, canned beans are one of my favorite muses. My two favorite things to do with them are to treat them as you would pasta—warming them in some tomato sauce with Parmesan, or an aglio olio, or a basil pesto—or to apply a favorite salad dressing to them and scoop them onto toast. This version is a little of both. To a quadfecta of ingredients—olive oil, garlic, anchovies, and lemon—that could make a crumpled piece of paper taste good (note: not fact-checked), I add a smidge of Dijon mustard and a small amount of capers (they’re so good here; please, try them), and warm a can of beans in it. They’re finished with some fried breadcrumbs reminiscent of the croutons essential to all good Caesar salads, and Parmesan, and then you’re supposed to slide them onto a bowl or plate—but nobody is going to know if you eat them straight from the pan.
(Note: Despite its cooking-for-one vibe, this is also very nicely doubled as a more substantial side dish.)—Deb Perelman
—Food52
From "Smitten Kitchen Keepers: New Classics for Your Forever Files" by Deb Perelman. Copyright © 2022 by Deb Perelman. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. —The Editors
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