This is very unlike me, but last night I was too pooped to post dinner!

I’m reading Tigers in Red Weather right now, and there’s a scene where the women are sitting on their porch in their silk slips because it’s too hot to wear anything else. They’re fanning themselves and drinking gin out of jelly jars.

It was that kind of hot.

Lazy beach days like that require a super simple, no thinking required dinner.

For that, there is spaghetti with aglio e olio.

In Italian, that translates to garlic and oil, and that’s, quite simply, all the dish is.

Pour some olive oil in a pan, add in the garlic and heat until the garlic just starts to brown.

Meanwhile, boil some water and cook up some spaghetti.

Dish up the spaghetti and pour the aglio e olio over the pasta.

Add a sprinkle of parmesan cheese.

This is a simple dish made from pantry staples that every cook should have in their back pocket.

I always have those ingredients on hand, so should there be last minute guests, or a heat induced malaise that makes a trip to the store sound like torture, dinner is still makeable.

Mom also whipped up some shrimp to go with the pasta.

For four people, she used two pounds of frozen shrimp, tails and shells on.

Toss the frozen shrimp in a big frying pan, douse with Old Bay seasoning and cook over medium until the shrimp’s cooked through.

Old Bay is another Delaware and Maryland shore thing. It’s a spice blend with red and black pepper, paprika and some other things, and it makes it’s way into pretty much everything down here – the crabs were cooked in it the other night, you can pick up Old Bay potato chips at the store…

If you’ve never had it, give it a try. You can bring a taste of the Eastern shore to your kitchen.

So, mom dished up heaping bowls of garlic spaghetti with garlic bread on the side and plopped a big bowl of old bay shrimp in the middle of the table for us to go at.

And go at it we did.

After dinner, our neighbor’s six-year old son came over with his mom to pick up glow stick bracelets from my mom because, yea, my mom has a bag full of army men, pez, glowsticks- pretty much any toy you could wants as a kid at the beach.

He took one step into our house, looked at his mom and said “Mama, it stinks in here!”

We couldn’t help but laugh.

He was right. It did stink in here.

But it was so good. And worth the stink.

**PS, aglio e olio is a great sauce to whip up in a pinch, but only if everyone is eating it and if you are not, I repeat NOT going to need to talk to anyone for the rest of the night.