Tonight my wife is away at a conference and I’m on my own. So I made myself some dinner, and watched a movie. I’m outta work, so I have a great resistance to paying restaurant prices. So I went to the supermarket and looked over their ready-made entrées. Bleagh. I needed to cook something real, if I wanted to eat something real.
I knew I had some pasta at home, and a couple of good sausages — Aidell’s andouille sausages, to be specific. Also I knew I had a small can of Contadina tomato sauce. I bought some Swanson’s chicken broth, and a can of canellini beans (that’s white beans, for you non-goombas)
So I chopped up a couple shallots and a big clove of garlic, sliced up the sausages, and put them all in a frying pan with enough olive oil, and some crushed red papper and started them cooking. Meanwhile I started a pot of salted water.
My wife has taught me, with some difficulty, that I must eat some green leafy vegetable with every single meal, or die. I obey this law at dinner time (no chard for breakfast). So I found some spinach in the fridge, and washed it and chopped it.
OK! The stuff in the frying pan looks done, so I add the tomato sauce, beans, and enough chicken broth to keep it soupy. The pasta goes into the boiling water, and I start the timer, 11 minutes for the pasta.
With 5 minutes to go I add the spinach to the other stuff. When the pasta’s done I drain it in a colander, put it in a bowl, dump the other stuff on it, and toss it. Pastafazoo!
Which is southern Italian dialect, in case you wondered, for pasta e fagioli, past and beans.
While all this was going on I had a few nice drinks.
Damn, was that ever good! While eating my pastafazoo, I watched Once Upon a Time In Mexico, which I recommend if you want to watch a mythic fantasy about crime and violence in Mexico.
My wife’s gonna be sorry she missed out.
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