My husband can be fickle.

He’ll devour a dish one night, then balk at eating the leftovers the next night.

Not with this stew.

When I announced the next evening that dinner was the remains of the  “Dijon and Cognac Beef Stew” over buttered egg noodles we had the night before, he fairly yelped with glee, smacking his lips in anticipation all over again.

This stew will do that to you.

It’s from “The Essential New York Times Cookbook” (W.W. Norton & Co.) by Amanda Hesser, a doorstop of a book with more than 1,000 recipes in it from the past 150 years, of which I recently received a review copy.

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I’ve got the TV set for watching the glittery ball drop in Manhattan’s Times Square and the fireworks exploding in technicolor over San Francisco.

I’ve got a bottle of fine bubbly chilling in the fridge.

And I’ve got my husband geared up to do battle with the long, unruly lines at the seafood counter at the local Asian market — all in effort to snag live Dungeness crab on New Year’s Eve.

It wouldn’t be a New Year’s Eve without any of that. Nope, not in my book.

You can have your lobster. I’ll take Dungeness over that any day.

Especially on New Year’s Eve, when you just can’t go wrong with simple yet spectacular seafood and glasses of Brut sparkling wine.

Sure, you can buy already cooked crab at your local seafood market. Just make sure it’s freshly cooked and there’s a lot of turnover or else you risk ending up with dry, stringy meat. And nobody wants that.

But having grown up in a Chinese-American household, I’m used to cooking my own at home for the freshest taste. My late-parents liked to steam our Dungeness. Then, my Dad would take a cleaver to the steaming hulks and crack them with a resounding wallop before bringing the massive platter to the table, where we would all dig in, our hands getting messier by the minute.

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