Lemon Garlic Green Beans

Let's pretend you had some leftover, frozen, butternut squash gnocchi in your freezer from the fall. If you happened to also have butter, fresh sage, an oyster mushroom, and some salt, I'd highly recommend chopping that mushroom, frying it in a healthy glob of butter with a pinch or two of kosher salt until its just brown, adding some sage leaves, frying those up until they're starting to get crunchy, adding more butter, dumping in the cooked gnocchi, stirring it all around, and serving it with a dash of freshly grated parmesan cheese. If you did all those things, you'd probably have a darn tasty meal sitting in front of you. Just sayin'.

Clearly, a dish like that needs a side, preferably a green one. I had some green beans, and I wasn't entirely sure how I wanted to cook them, but I had recently had some of the lemon-garlic olives from Whole Foods, and those are tasty, so I decided to make lemon-garlic green beans. Not quite the same as olives, but hey, they were still pretty good. No photo, and no Ed-rating, but I'm guessing he'd like these.

Lemon Garlic Green Beans
Makes however much you'd like
Green beans, of some amount - they don't really cook down, so just pick out as many as you'd like to eat.
1 lemon
3 cloves garlic
olive oil
salt

Heat the olive oil in a pan over medium-ish heat. Chop the garlic finely. When the oil is hot, add the garlic, stir it around, and then add the green beans. Sprinkle with some kosher salt. Slice the lemon into 4-6 round slices, and place those on top of the beans, mashing them a bit with a wooden spoon so they start to give out juice. Let the beans sit without moving them for a few minutes, then stir everything around, and let it sit for another couple of minutes. Taste a bean every once and a while. Once they taste as cooked as you want them, pull them off the heat. Discard the lemons and garlic pieces, just eat the green beans. They were delicious like that.