It was a typical Friday evening. Leaving downtown late with an estimated arrival time at home of about 7 p.m.

What are we going to do for dinner?

We could stop and eat in Kaneohe at our regular Thai restaurant, but the cats are waiting and hungry.

Is there something that we can scrounge from the freezer that won’t take too long to cook?

So…chopped onion browned in a 12″ cast iron frying pan. Add garlic. Dig a leftover low-fat Italian sausage out of the freezer, cut into pieces, drop in with the onion-garlic to brown.

Start a pot of water heating for the pasta.

Back to the frying pan. Open a can of relatively low salt chopped or crushed tomatoes, add enough to be the base for sauce. Drop in a few anchovies. Add Penzey’s Italian Herb Mix, a nice combo of oregeno, basil, thyme, marjoram, and perhaps a couple of other spices, a handful of raisins, several chopped hot peppers, then a little water or wine until a nice consistency. Cover and let it simmer for maybe 20 minutes.

Meanwhile, bring the water to a boil and drop in the whole wheat pasta. Cook for the recommended time, usually 9-12 minutes.

At about the same time the pasta went in, I turned up the heat under the sauce a bit and added a handful of frozen shimp from a bag in the freezer. A few minutes later, in went a chopped green pepper.

Meda was preparing a plate with sliced tomatoes, avocado slices, and several kinds of olives. I opened a bottle of Malbec from Argentina.

And then it all came together. Drain the pasta, cover with sauce and mix, serve. Add cat. To the table, that is. Not to the pasta. In this case, it’s Ms. Harry, also known as Harriet, who takes up the position. Then eat.

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