Tag Archives: easy dinner

Suggested Servings: Fried Eggplant

Tonight, Sean is out of town. It’s warm in Oakland: We’re having our typical October summer. I decided to skip the gym after work, and ran a few errands instead. Good errands, the kind I love: crafting supplies and groceries. I stopped by A Verb for Keeping Warm to buy a zipper for a skirt I’m making, and then visited the big, overwhelming, farther away grocery store, the one that makes Sean anxious with its crowded aisles and huge, pushy carts. The one that makes me swoon with the possibilities of all that it contains. I browsed and binged on peaches and apples and pasta and avocados, and on my drive home, even the traffic on the 580 couldn’t irritate me.

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Mushroom, Broccoli, and Goat Cheese Pasta

I usually consider cooking to be a relaxing, almost meditative activity. But sometimes, life needs to be easier. There are days when I want dinner to be quick and to require very little thinking, and that’s often when I (and you, too, I suspect) turn to pasta. Pasta is the king of the quick and easy dinner. You can mix almost anything into a bowl of pasta and it will turn out great. It requires few dishes, and a minimal amount of time, leaving you the rest of your evening to unwind and feel refreshed enough to face the rest of the week.

The best easy pasta dishes bring together different flavors and textures, and end up so wildly colorful and bright tasting that you can hardly believe it only took 20 minutes to get it on the table. This particular pasta dish absolutely achieves that objective. The mushrooms and pasta are chewy and tender, the broccoli big and crunchy, and it’s all tied together with a little slip of cream and goat cheese. The sun-dried tomatoes and basil bring big blockbuster summer flavor to the party.
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