A Culinary Discovery

I was going to have a quick pasta with ajo y ojo (butter and olive oil, plus garlic) tonight, add a little natural Italian sausage, but this is what I ended up with and it was so easy!

Cooks around the world have for generations kept favored seasonings and seasoning mixtures handy, and I'm sure I'm not the first to come up with this combination. But, it's new to me.

My diet this month has been heavily favoring mushrooms and onions, among other things, for immune-boosting properties.  Since mushrooms don't last long in the fridge, and onions don't keep well, either, a couple of weeks ago I decided to just saute a whole onion, and a whole box of mushrooms -- separately.  I used what I needed for my frittata, stored the rest in the fridge.  A few days later I bought a Newman's Own pepperoni pizza and decided to use the leftover mushroom/onion mixture on top of that.  Wonderful!

Did the same thing yesterday.   Today, when I wanted pasta, I got the bright idea to toss some of the mixture into the 'sauce' (nothing but olive oil, butter, garlic and Italian sausage, to that point).  Again, delicious! And oh, so easy.  I'm thinking this is going to be a staple of my fridge now, and I'll bet I find all kinds of uses for it.

Quiet day here -- sun is out again and it feels so good.  I spent an hour and a half in the back room just flaking paint off the door trim.  That's really hard work for me -- I'm either reaching up above my shoulders, bending over, or down on my knees.  Doesn't sound so difficult, but holding the positions for the necessary length of time really upsets my spine, both in the damaged neck area and the damaged lower area.  Otherwise, it was a day of laundry and cleaning. And finishing a new 'Tale' for my other blog.

The best thing to happen this weekend -- other than the snow melting -- is that the neighbors across the street with all the kids have moved out!  They were the bane of the neighborhood -- one early teenage girl and four or five younger ones ranging from just toddling up to maybe 8 or so. These kids were wild.  Totally undisciplined -- played in the street, rode their bikes in the street, on sidewalks, on yards, wherever they wanted to go.  No sense of property rights -- never bothered my yard too much, but did some damage to my neighbor's fish pond and generally drove us all a little nutty.  Pretty much tried to destroy the front screened porch -- screening down, slats from the lattice work torn out to play with.  I was never sure how many people lived in that 2-bedroom house that's smaller than mine.  Parents and 5-6 kids, plus one other single man, at least.  My neighbors said there were two families living there and that may be the case.  It was hard to tell who belonged with who.  While I'm glad they're gone, I'm a little trepidatious as well.  You know that old saying that the devil you know is better than the devil you don't know?  I'm just hoping we don't get somebody worse in there next time.