There is a dish my grandmother made outside Naples that I can still smell if I close my eyes: zucchini ripieni, squash hollowed out and filled with whatever the kitchen had that day, baked until the skin wrinkles and the filling goes golden on top. She never wrote the recipe down, because the recipe was never the point. So it warms me to see the Boston Globe sharing Nancy Diaferio's version this week, green squash stuffed with hot sausage and rice. This is food from exactly that tradition.

Diaferio builds hers with a mixture of hot sausage and rice, spooned into squash and roasted until everything collapses into each other a little. The sausage fat bastes the rice from inside, the rice softens the sausage, and the squash ends up being both the bowl and the meal. Tomatoes make an appearance too, and the piece traces the family of stuffed vegetables back through dolma, which is correct. Every culture that cooks has figured out that a vegetable can hold whatever you put in it.

This is also, and I want to say this plainly, one of the cheapest complete dinners you can put on a table. Squash in September costs almost nothing. A pound of sausage feeds six when you stretch it with rice. Good food does not require expensive ingredients. It requires care and patience, and a dish like this is the proof. My grandmother fed a family on principles like these.

If you make it, a few small things matter. Salt the inside of the squash before filling it. Don't pack the filling tight, because rice needs room to swell. And save the pulp you scoop out. Fried with garlic and a little olive oil, it becomes tomorrow's side dish or the base of a soup. In my house we threw away nothing, and the squash pulp was considered almost a prize.

Hot sausage gives you heat that carries the whole plate, but sweet sausage works too if you're feeding kids, and then you can put red pepper flakes on the table for the grown-ups. Either way, eat them straight from the oven, when the tops are still crisp and the squash gives way under the fork.

Sunday dinner, no price tag attached. This one goes in my rotation the moment the market has squash.