It's official

Sometimes I really am a complete idiot! I've had a pack of ground beef in the fridge that was going to go bad if I didn't cook it soon - the spoil date on it was Jan 24 - today - so today was the day I'd decided that, no matter what, I was gonna get off my arse and make that lasagna!

My first mistake was to forget to go to the store to buy onions and tomatoes...I knew I needed them and had every intention of stopping off on my way home, but by the time I left work I'd completely forgotten! Being a "purist" and morally opposed to using jars of pre-made pasta sauce, those are not only key ingredients, but ones that I absolutely cannot do without.

but...there are shortcuts that, while I'm loathe to take them, sometimes you've just gotta do what you gotta do, so I used canned tomatoes for my sauce instead of fresh! There, I said it! I'm so ashamed! BUT in my defense, I did use fresh garlic, peppers & herbs - it was only the tomatoes I cheated with.

You may start throwing real tomatoes at me now if you wish...

So anyway, sauce on the simmer, I turned to start on the meat, and wouldn't you know it, it had spoiled! One would think I'd have had the sense to get out all my ingredients before I started cooking, but I was so thrown off already I didn't even bother to check! Oh yeah, and I'd already cooked the lasagna noodles too, so here I had noodles and sauce, but no meat and no veggies with which to make a nice vegetable lasagna.

I felt like a complete idiot! Anyway, I decided to save the lasagna noodles for tomorrow and just make spaghetti tonight instead, so I went to the pantry to get out my trusty anglehair pasta, and lo and behold, for perhaps the first time in my adult life, I was OUT! Really?!?!

This dinner was not going well AT ALL! I found a box of linguine and dumped it into the boiling water only to realize that there wasn't enough there for two servings, so I took out another package (of a different kind of pasta, of course) and thought to add just a bit, but then I couldn't think what use I'd have for a half pack of random noodles so I dumped the whole thing in...

Mike likes meat with his pasta dishes and I had some kielbasa in the freezer, so I just took off a couple of links of that and cooked it up while the noodles boiled, so what we ended up with for dinner was a thrown together assortment of mixed noodles, spicy sausages and "almost" homemade pasta sauce - all of which took about the same amount of time I would have needed to make the lasagna, including the baking period - in other words, about twice as long as it should have taken!

Boy, am I glad dinner's over tonight! Now where's my wine?