SHROOMS! I cooked a delicious dinner last night: a modified version of a recipe from a Food & Wine cookbook. Here’s the deal. (All quantities are “add until it looks right.”)

I used: A nonstick pan. Olive oil, garlic (I used a heaping spoonful from a jar of minced garlic, but obviously you can use fresh chopped), a package of portobello caps (one cap for one person), button a.k.a. plain old white mushrooms, enoki mushrooms, fresh oyster mushrooms, shiitake marinade, heavy cream, fresh chervil, fresh basil, oregano, butter, and spaghetti. You can obviously mix all this up with different pastas and herbs and mushroom combinations (porcini, cremini, maybe chanterelles?).

How-to: Set water to boil, add pasta. While pasta is cooking, chop up however many ‘shrooms you want to use. Plunk ’em in the pan with the garlic and saute in olive oil. Add marinade. Add cream (you don’t need much), stir a bit until it’s all mixed, shred up the fresh herbs and add them along with any dried herbs you’re using, cook a bit more. Drain pasta, butter pasta, cover pasta with lovely mushroom sauce. Active cooking time: ten minutes, maybe fifteen?

Cost: This is definitely pricier than most of my pasta sauces. I bought most of the ingredients (exceptions: garlic, oregano, pasta, butter, olive oil, button mushrooms, all of which I already owned) at the local Whole Foods, and it set me back about $18. However, I should have enough ingredients for two dinners and two light lunches/snacks (leftovers), and I expect to have about half of the basil, at least half the chervil, and about 90% of the delicious shiitake marinade left when the second batch is finished. So it’s not nearly as expensive as it seems, given that this sauce tasted like something I’d eat at a restaurant rather than the yummy but very homey sauces I usually cook.