Along with all the fresh farm corn our lovely guest brought us this week, was an enormous bag of bright green beans. These were far from effeminate haricots verts. Big Midwestern boys, these were mammoth and nearly bursting at their seams. Honestly, we could have done anything with these beans and they would have been good. But instead of using a plain Jane recipe, we decided to test the limits, albeit in a 15-minute time span.

If you can expect one thing in life, it's that a Mario Batali recipe will bring the flavor. This one certainly does. Although the mint in the dish sounds suspiciously like the peas with mint that we'd made a couple of weeks back, it is actually the crisp red onions that steal the show here. I was convinced that I'd burned them, even though I had written consent from Batali. Ends up he's right. Sweet, crunchy red onions are a marvelous thing.

Green Beans with Mint and Crispy Red Onion