For the last two weeks I’ve had the latest issue of Food & Wine sitting on my kitchen table. It’s not that I haven’t read it – I have – but I don’t allow myself to keep the back issues and so I hate to recycle it until I’m absolutely done with it. I keep going back through it to make sure there isn’t one more recipe to cut out or one more restaurant review to make a note of. As a result, I’ve been staring constantly at a large front-cover photo of chicken salad with Green Goddess dressing. With predictable results.

I have actually never made Green Goddess dressing. I mean, ever. So this was sort of a duh moment for me, as I realized that I had fresh herbs all over the place, garlic and anchovies ready to hand, and a tub of sour cream in the fridge left over from our Monday night enchiladas. There was no reason at all not to make this. And I had the perfect vehicle for the dressing: a large bag of perfect, slender green beans from Blue Heron Farm. I cut the beans in half, blanched them in boiling salted water and drained them, then got to work on my dressing.

Being incapable of following a recipe for salad dressing, I made this up as I went along. I pulled some parsley and basil from the garden and chopped them roughly, tossing them into a small food processor with two anchovies, a clove of garlic, two large spoonfuls of mayonnaise and one of sour cream. I thought about cutting open a fresh lemon but decided on champagne vinegar instead, adding just a small dash. Once all was blended, I stirred in a good handful of finely chopped fresh chives, then scraped it all over the blanched and cooled green beans. Once it was all mixed up, I decided it needed a little color and added one fresh tomato, cut into thin wedges. Perfect.

In a word? Yum. We ate our green bean salad alongside a truly spectacular rack of pork baby back ribs, which Jon had barbecued and glazed with reduced apple cider. A bottle of Pinot Noir rosé was a textbook-perfect accompaniment to the beans, complementing the sharp herbs while cutting through the creaminess. I suspect this will not be my last batch of Green Goddess.