Sunday dinner

Every other Sunday, my mate and I have the entire day and night to ourselves when my kids and his kid are with their respective other parents. Our favorite way to spend a good part of those Sundays is to come up with a dinner menu, make a shopping list, head to Fresh Market, then come home and cook and drink and eat until it's time to go to bed. I adore this ritual date. Love it.

Last night we made lasagna. It's been a really long time since I've eaten lasagna, especially the kind I was craving yesterday--the old-fashioned kind, with tomato sauce and Italian sausage. We found a recipe that looked like a winner on epicurious, and decided to make a simple spinach salad with balsamic vinaigrette to accompany it. We also got a great loaf of focaccia and I roasted a fat head of garlic to serve with the bread. My mate, who likes eggplant (I don't...yet), also breaded and pan-fried some slices of eggplant for himself. For dessert we opted to try a recipe I'd ripped out of Food + Wine, for molten chocolate cakes with peanut butter filling. Yes, molten chocolate cake is a cliche dessert. It's also delicious. So there.

It's worth mentioning that at Fresh Market, they were out of mozzarella cheese, and so we went to the deli counter and asked the expressionless young man there to just cut off a pound's worth of cheese for us without slicing it. He stood there slackjawed, before finally saying, "Uh, can you tell me about how much would be a pound, because I have no idea." So I drew an imaginary line on the log of cheese and said, "Try about here, and we'll add or take away as needed." He did--and the thing weighed in at 1.02 lbs. I was pretty damn proud of myself (I'm mathematically challenged, and I'm no professional cook or estimator), but my mate, Slacky the counter guy, and the customer waiting behind me acted as if nothing monumental had happened. What the hell? I was forced to high-five myself, which isn't very satisfying.

Wine: I picked out an $8 bottle of red called Nero D'Avola because I'd seen it listed on a wine list at a restaurant I liked, and the label said it went well with baked pasta. And it did. Everything we made was fantastic. My dessert looked exactly like the photo on Food + Wine's site. (High-five again!) I'm having the leftovers for dinner tonight and will attempt to get the kids to try it, but I doubt they will. Still, I keep trying.