After the feast we had on Saturday to celebrate Shannon and Mike’s wedding anniversary, Clif and I had leftover steak, potatoes, and corn on the cob. We have always been a family that has eaten leftovers. I get extremely irritated when something gets pushed to the back of the refrigerator, and I recoil in horror at what I see when I open the container. Throwing food away seems just plain wrong—a waste of money and a waste of resources.

However, it’s one thing to gamely eat what’s left in the refrigerator and have your husband say, “Well, that wasn’t too bad,” and quite another thing to eat with gusto and hear your (Yankee) husband say, “Pretty darned good.”

With the steak, potatoes, and corn, I was aiming for “pretty darned good.” After all, they were more than pretty darned good the night before when they were freshly cooked and served. All Sunday, off and on, I thought about what to do with those leftovers, and what came to me was some kind of simple cold salad with the addition of roasted garlic and olive oil.

Therefore, when evening came, I dry roasted a clove of garlic, let it cool, and minced it. I chopped the potatoes and the steak, stripped the corn from an ear of corn, and tossed everything in a big bowl. I added the garlic, a generous splash of olive oil, and salt and pepper. How did it taste? Not too bad but not pretty darned good. It needed something else to give it a little pizzazz. Balsamic vinegar, I decided, and that did the trick.

As the evening was lovely and warm, Clif and I ate on the patio. We listened to Talking Heads, and behind them, in a chorus, crickets added their lovely high voices. We had rum and Coke and toasted the end of summer. Clif’s verdict? Not only did he pronounce the meal “pretty darned good” but also good enough to make on its own.

Now that’s what I call success.