I really didn’t want to buy too many groceries for this weekend given that both Chris and I would be traveling for work this week, so I tried to make dinner from mostly what was in our pantry or fridge, with the exception of fresh vegetables. I ended up cooking green lentils, the dried fusilli bucati pasta we brought back from our Northern Italy trip, and tossing it in my homemade pesto from two weeks ago, roasted zucchini and broccoli, and some red pepper flakes. Chris felt like we needed some real cheese in this pasta (I used nutritional yeast as a cheese substitute in the pesto making because I didn’t have any cheese on hand and didn’t want to buy any at that time), so he ran out to buy some grana padano for grating, which is basically like a very young and un-aged parmesan.

I realize that my “kitchen sink” cooking can be perceived as a bit uppity, because who really has homemade pesto that just happens to be sitting in one’s fridge, and who has fancy dried pasta brought back from a foreign country in their pantry? But hey, this is how we roll in our apartment.