On Pattie's food blog, A Slice of Pattie, she has a recipe for aligue pasta which I followed without much difficulty. Other aligue pasta recipes jazz up the sauce with seafood and cream but I like the simplicity of this recipe. That rich, briny taste of aligue can stand on its own and and dresses up some al dente spaghetti nicely after being sauteed in olive oil and garlic. A squeeze of lemon juice adds some acidity and cuts through the richness. If you like some heat like I do, red pepper flakes and crushed black pepper go with aligue really nicely, too.

The recipe also calls for fresh basil as a garnish, but I piled it on with a generous hand. Aside from the fact that fresh basil is plain old delicious, it gave the dish some texture and kept the aligue flavor from being too overwhelming.

It was so easy to make, and if you're as lazy as I am, you can get away with just using one pan to cook the whole dish in. I finished cooking in under half an hour and was immediately back on the couch, plunging my fork repeatedly into this sumptuous dish. I'm not gonna lie, I definitely felt my body slow down (I was nodding off before 10pm), and my cholesterol levels definitely climbed a bit.

But I suppose there are worse vices in life than delicious food that makes you want nothing other than to curl up and take a nap, right?

I say forget the guilt for a second and let's raise our forks to moments of gustatory bliss ...