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A man's take on pasta from contributing author, Dave Utrata.

I often find myself reaching for pasta for those quick meal creations: easy to do, not much time involved, and go well with wine.  The added twist recently was to use up some items lingering in my refrigerator and cabinets, while still delivering a meaty, perhaps smoky flavor.  While you can expect that the flavoring balance on this should probably be tweaked to personal preference, I was fairly pleased with how this attempt turned out.

Ingredients

• 5 "baby bella" (small portobella) mushrooms, sliced


• 6 garlic cloves, sliced


• 1-2 slices of rare roast beef, as in deli style cut - intended for sandwiches, chopped fine


• 1 can Lima beans (with bacon added), drained


• 1 cup pasta/tomato sauce - I used Bertolli's garlic & Vidalia onion sauce
  


• 1 chipotle pepper from can in adobo sauce, chopped


• some small green olives, sliced


• dash white wine vinegar


• olive oil as needed


• rotini (or your favorite) pasta

    Start the pasta by getting enough well salted water to boil; follow the typical timing to prepare.  In a pan, begin sauteing the garlic and mushrooms in some olive oil.  When the mushrooms have absorbed oil and the garlic is just browning, add the roast beef bits and the chopped pepper.  Stir well, and then add the pasta sauce.   Stir in the green olives and the Lima beans. 
    At this point, you want to keep an eye on the mixture.  The beans can thicken the sauce too much if you're not careful.  Keep stirring and don't let the heat get too high.  The vinegar was used to thin the sauce, but it also seemed to accent some of the sweeter or more pungent notes in the taste, the sharpness of the olives, for example, while not overwhelming the smokiness of the bacon flavor of the beans and the chipotle.  Also, a bit of the pasta water may be used to think the sauce to the desired consistency.
    Drain the pasta, pour on the desired amount of sauce (this recipe provided me with enough sauce for two good sized pasta helpings) and add grated Parmesan as desired.  Serve with red wine, duh.
    As Heather pointed out in her last pasta offering, refrigerating some of this for tomorrow's dinner really does enhance the taste.  I don't know if this is because the pasta more fully takes on the taste of the sauce or if some cosmic melding of the flavors creates some new nuance of flavor.  But if I was happy with this the first night, you can be sure I smiled big the second night when I tasted it the next day!