All right my friends. I rarely ever do this. But I was at the store and I felt unhealthy, and I went to the vegetable section and purchased vegetables and announced to my husband, “I shall cook a healthy dinner and it will involve vegetables and we will be healthy for once in our lives, goddamnit.” He protested, but I believe I may have started doing a crazy robot dance and a super fly rap crazy chanted something about how the taqueria is killing us, so he said maybe, just maybe, just this once he would eat something cooked by me involving some vegetables.

So the other thing I snuck in there is the tofu. Sends shivers down many spines, but it is so very, very healthy. This being Santa Cruz, this would be what we can eat and get away with around here. I believe we refer to this as Regional Cuisine.

I also selected some more green things like green beans and broccoli, for no other reason than I don’t hate them and they are easy to cut up.

Don’t cry when you do the next part. If you were on Top Chef, it would involve your knife skills and I would have a closeup of my old, dull knife trying to hack through an onion while I try to hold it together and do not weep. Luckily nothing happened today that would incite the weeping. No Timmy almost died, no pitbulls tried to eat my dogs, only one dogwalk contact was missed collectively when I practiced with the dogs. It was a pretty boring yet non traumatic old day.

Be careful because this is real cooking with the heat, and if you happen to forget you left the oil heating in the frying pan it will SIZZLE when you fling the onions into the pan. Flinging is really the only exciting part of all this, so fling away and enjoy. Let’s not start oil fires, OK? You try to remember when you put the olive oil in the pan and turn the heat to high and decide to go look for paint in the garage instead of slicing vegetables.

Oh yeah. This might be the other OK part of the cooking. If it is refreshing cool wine, drink on up. Especially if you had a hot, sweaty day out in the dirt at your office. The vegetables will taste better the more wine you drink.

The garlic never hurts either.

And then might as well splash some wine in with the green crap because what the hell. Right Marsha?

Wave at Timmy. I caught him pacing by the kitchen door there. He goes back and forth front door, back door, front door, back door. It’s his hobby I guess. Far as he can tell, some drunk lady is catching him and dragging him over to the cooking show set.

Now I was like, what the hell else could I add to this so it looks more like food and not a big pan of green crap with some wine in it that no one is going to want to eat? Canned tomotoes? What the hell.

And I already had some water boiling for the WHOLE WHEAT spaghetti noodles. I heard these make your thighs petite and no gut busting carbs that are like the equivalent of one stick of butter per bite. Like uber healthy. Have to lie to get Gary to eat this dinner for sure. He is so sneaking out for pizza later.

OK, Come on. I made this. I am not kidding you. I ate it too. Gary, maybe not. It wasn’t so bad. Tasted like vegetables over some spaghetti noodles. You could try it too. You might even like the tofu part. And no dogs bug you in the kitchen when you make this! They are like so over the whole thing of green things on the counter. Not even trying to get a scrap thrown. You go on and eat your pizza dinner tonight or you try this. I am pretty sure you will thank me when you are so overcome with the healthiness that you can serpentine where you thought not possible before, and put in the most daring front cross due to your new found speed of health.