ode.

Those who know me will not be too too surprised by this, but I found myself thinking it as I was walking up the stairs today with two laden Dirk bags and yes obviously felt compelled to affirm it here in these pages: I love grocery shopping. It may be my current favorite regularly-occurring non-destructive activity, which I'm sure says as much about how I'm spending my time these days as it does about my household chore preferences.

This love of mine is of course the blessing and the curse, but I'm doing a pretty good job with the current grocery budget. A critical success factor here is that I'm the only household member who grocery shops now, this is on purpose, and it's just way better in terms of knowing what's in the fridge and disposing of leftovers and etc etc etc.

So tonight is a end-of-week fridgecleaner, the "baked Italian vegetable casserole". It's also the night I've decided to start referring to zucchini the way that non-Italian Europeans do and thus we are now calling it courgette, mostly because zucchini never ever looks like it's spelled right.

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baked courgette, mozzarella, red sauce. 

2 courgettes
2 balls mozzarella
can o' mushrooms, drained, chopped, browned
1 onion

nutmeg
smoked salt
black pepper

1 cup ricotta
16 good black olives, pitted, torn
3 cups red sauce I made earlier this week
20 fresh basil leaves

parmigiano for grating/dusting

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Other cooking instructions not so interesting, but I used Mara's suggested ingredient stratification and it was nice, it went like this, top to bottom:

mozzarella/parmigiano/sauce
courgette
sauce
ricotta/basil/olives
courgette
sauce
mushrooms/onions
mozzarella
courgette
sauce

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