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happens to be available. Often, for the Mexican-born members of the kitchen staff, that meant a simple salad of equal parts raw onion, tomato, avocado, and jalapeño, dressed with lime juice. The chile in the salad was treated not as an accent, but as a vegetable in its own right, and while the salad was spicy (raw onion is hot, too!), it also had an undeniably fantastic flavor. It encouraged us to get bold with our chiles when the mood strikes, to treat them as a vegetable the same way we do an eggplant or a mushroom. If you choose chiles that are tolerably hot, you’ll add new dimensions to all sorts of dishes.

Dark poblanos often fit the bill because they tend to be milder than many jalapeños and they’ve got terrific green-pepper flavor. In this adaptation of the easy collard greens recipe we make on weeknights, poblano strips are charred in the pan with the chorizo, giving the dish a depth and an exoticism rarely found in typical collard greens recipes.

2 teaspoons peanut or canola oil

8 ounces fresh chorizo (see Chorizo Shopping Notes), casings removed, cut into roughly 1-inch pieces; or 4 ounces cured chorizo, kielbasa, or other smoked sausage, finely diced

3 poblano chiles, seeded and sliced into thin 2- to 3-inch strips (about 3 cups)

2 teaspoons finely chopped garlic

1½ pounds collard greens (about 1 bunch), ribs removed, leaves thinly sliced (1 packed quart)

1 teaspoon kosher salt, plus more to taste

2 tablespoons red wine vinegar

1 Pour the oil into a 12-inch skillet or sauté pan set over high heat, and when it shimmers, add the chorizo. Cook, chopping up the (fresh) sausage with the back of a spoon, until the sausage has rendered most of its fat, about 2 minutes. Add the poblanos, and continue to cook until they have softened slightly and the chorizo is cooked through, about 4 minutes.

2 Add the garlic, half the collards, the salt, and 2 tablespoons water to the skillet. Cook, turning the collards with tongs and adding more greens as those in the pan wilt, until all the collards are in the skillet. Continue to cook until the collards have softened and become dark green, about 6 minutes. Add the vinegar and continue to cook the collards, turning them occasionally, until the vinegar has completely evaporated and the pan is dry, about 3 minutes more. Season to taste with salt, if necessary, and divide the collards, poblanos, and chorizo among 4 warm serving plates. Serve immediately.

chorizo shopping notes ••• Chorizo, a smoked-paprika-spiked pork sausage with origins in Spain and Portugal, is most commonly found in American markets as a dry-cured (fully cooked) packaged sausage imported from Spain or Mexico. But it can be also be found as a fresh sausage at some butchers, and we prefer the latter variety in these collards if it’s available. Cut from their casings, the sausages crumble as they cook, distributing tasty little bits of flavor throughout the collard greens and offering a more integrated taste experience. But the cured variety is no slouch, and in fact tends to be a more intense experience altogether (similar to the way dried herbs have a more powerful flavor than fresh). And the cured variety holds its shape when cooked, so it tends to be a more muscular, toothsome presence in a dish. For that reason, if you can’t find fresh chorizo, use half the quantity of a cured chorizo—or another smoky dry-cured sausage—in this recipe.

SKILLET GREEN BEANS WITH ORANGE

serves 4 • TIME: 10 minutes preparation, 10 minutes cooking

The slender, tender French haricots verts that have emerged in upscale food markets in recent years bear no resemblance to the leathery-skinned, stout green beans our parents grew when we were kids, the kind that seemed suited only to long simmering in a pot with a chunk of really good bacon. In this recipe, we “skillet-toast” those fat beans, which adds a charred, smoky dimension to them, transforming even the toughest beans—which, truth be told, is the kind we find most often in the precincts of the U.S. we inhabit—into something as addictively delicious as