"Just Add A Pound Of Butter"

No, not really, dinner relied rather more on olive oil, garlic and cheese.

This is what happens when I forget my partner is not, in fact, coming home for dinner. The spaghetti sauce is a type of bastardised bolognese, which I use for disposing of mushrooms and root vegetables forgotten in the vegetable drawer.

Today's version contained these:

- butter for frying
- a few onions
- several large garlic cloves
- celery root
- parsley root
- oyster mushrooms
- a pound of ground beef
- simple tomato sauce (99% tomatoes plus sugar, salt and basil)
- herbs (garlic, more basil, thyme, oregano)
- black pepper
- salt
- half a glass of a nice chianti waiting for consumption on the kitchen counter
- olive oil
- lemon

I sautéed the vegetables first, then browned the ground beef, then added tomato sauce onto all this. Wine into the chef. More wine onto the pan. More wine into the chef. Etc. I served the sauce with parmigiano reggiano, spaghetti and some zucchini that I cut into tagliatelle-like stripes and shoved into a hot oven for a few minutes.

The salad was a faux cesar salad, made while the sauce was simmering on the stove (this one did for a few hours, which did it a world of good); I had no bread cubes but I did have an avocado and some radishes that needed to go, so some substitutions were made. For dressing, I went with an egg free version and threw a garlic clove, dijon mustard, tabasco sauce, worcester sauce, a few anchovy filets, olive oil, parmigiano reggiano and a small dash of sour cream into the blender. Then I poured more wine into the chef.