At the end of last week, when the weather was still fairly cool, I made a large batch of spaghetti sauce with the intention of putting together a casserole with some ricotta cheese I have in the freezer. On sale, I had bought a package of chicken sausage, and I was planning to add that, too. But yesterday things heated up, and even though I like it hot, baking a casserole on a day when it was 90 in the shade didn’t seem like such a great idea.

“All right,” I said to my husband, Clif. “Here are the choices: I can freeze the sauce for another time. I can pick up some chicken at the store and cook it all in the Crock-Pot. Or, we can just have the sauce over pasta.”

Clif hesitated for only a few minutes. “Let’s have the sauce over pasta.”

As Clif is a huge lover of sauce over pasta, his choice did not surprise me.

With the sauce being pretty a much a stand-alone, it seemed to me that a few additional ingredients would be in order—peppers and mushrooms. Naturally, this is completely a matter of taste. Zucchini or summer squash would also be good additions. Or just the chicken sausage.

In a large skillet, I browned the precooked sausage in olive oil. When the sausages were browned on one side, I added the peppers and let them sizzle. Meanwhile, I had a smaller skillet of sliced mushrooms sautéing. When the peppers were soft, I added the spaghetti sauce to the large skillet. Ditto for the mushrooms. What else? A pinch or two of red pepper, and some leftover wine from the day before, about a quarter of a cup. (Less wine would be fine, too. I thought the sauce was a little sweet. Clif thought it was tasty the way it was.)

While the pasta cooked, the sauce simmered, and when everything was done, Clif and I took our plates out to the patio. The temperature had dropped to 80, just right for me. While we ate, drank iced tea, and chatted, a thrush played its evening song, going up and down on its little pan pipes. A slight breeze ruffled the trees.

With full stomachs, we lounged contentedly on the patio. Did we stay there for the entire evening? We did not. The air was heavy, but there was nary a rumble of thunder, so off we went for a bike ride, by Marancook Lake, where the loons called to each other as twilight came.

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