KITCHEN ADVENTURES: SPREAD THE LOVE. I had a ridiculously tasty lunch the other day.

Anyway, ingredients (use the amount that seems right to you): sourdough bread, garlic, fresh ginger, crimini mushrooms (button and shiitake would also work), cream cheese, olive oil, and a bottled sesame-ginger sauce I bought at the Whole Foods corporate-charity sale.

What I did: Finely chopped the garlic, peeled and finely chopped the ginger, and finely chopped the mushrooms. Heated olive oil in a pot. Put a big thick slab of sourdough in the toaster oven. When the oil was very hot, dumped in the garlic, ginger, and mushrooms.

When they were deliciously fragrant, I threw in a mess of cream cheese and some of the bottled sauce. This all got hit with the immersion blender until it was smooth and creamy with a few bits of mushroom still visible.

At this point the sourdough was nicely toasted, so I put it on a plate and topped it with the cream cheese mixture.

the taste: Incredible! Lush, with that ginger-mushroom medley I adore. I didn’t need extra salt (although you might), given how many of the ingredients were premade, and I usually throw extra salt on everything. The only slight issue was that I found it very hard to judge how much cream cheese to use, so I ended up with at least 1 1/2 times the amount I really needed to thickly coat the toast. That’s okay though–I really did not mind basically eating some of the spread with my fingers. It is that good.