Honey-Glazed Wax Beans & Bok Choy with Soy Sauce and Butter

I've said it before, but it bears repeating--one of the things I most appreciate about The Gourmet Cookbook is the Vegetables chapter. It's so easy to get into a rut with vegetables, and all too often the solution offered by well-meaning newspaper articles or magazines is to print elaborate recipes that more often intimidate than invite.

Not this cookbook. Yes, there are some exotic veggie recipes here (I'm looking at you, Creamed Chayote with Chives) but the bulk of them take the exact same amount of time you would ordinarily take with something and invite you in at a slightly different angle.

So it is with Honey-Glazed Wax Beans, which simply asks you to toss your steamed beans (and they can be green beans as well) with honey, lemon zest, and salt.

That's it.

And you've completely transformed them. Try it.

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When my friend Elizabeth joined me for dinner recently, she wanted to bring an offering from her refrigerator, and because of her involvement with a farm share program happened to have a lot of baby bok choy.

I was excited, because in my never-ending quest to find excuses to cook a new recipe from The Gourmet Cookbook I found Bok Choy with Soy Sauce and Butter.

Soy sauce and butter. Mmmmmm. Back when I didn't give a hoot about either carbs OR fat (or sodium), I used to toss spaghetti with soy sauce and butter, and if I were gilding the lily I'd throw in a little parmesan. I can't tell you what a satisfying mid-afternoon snack that makes.

So I had high hopes for this recipe, even when I saw it also involved oyster sauce, a product I'm not all that crazy about.

This recipe isn't online so I'll just tell you how it goes--stir together equal amounts soy and oyster sauce in a bowl, and add water to thin. Heat a pan, throw in your chopped bok choy and some salt, stir for a bit, then add the soy/oyster sauce + a little butter and stir for a little more til it looks done.

Truth? I thought the finished product was a little watery. It could have been I wasn't using a hot enough pan to evaporate the water, but if I were doing it again I wouldn't use as much (or maybe not any) water in the sauce.