It's time to come back to earth. I remove the zucchini. Now to a very important rule of cooking. Never wash that pan. Not yet, anyway, not with all those beautiful flavors lurking on the bottom. Keep that pan hot and splash into it whatever liquid you have on hand. Wine is a chef's favorite. Juice will work just fine. I happen to have some balsamic vinegar within arm's reach. You want to boil this down into what they call a reduction, scraping and blending in the tasty pan bits - the fond - as you go. I reduce mine to nearly a syrupy consistency, then pour it into the "everything" bowl where my sausage and mushrooms and zucchini are idling, along with a lot of the liquids they were cooked in.

By now, my penne is ready for draining.

Once drained, the penne goes back in the pan it came from. A few seconds in the dry heat will take care of any excess moisture. Now this is important. My everything pastas are not about consistency. No uniformity of sauce for me. We're going to have liquids from three sources entering that pan - four including the fond - and we want to create the impression of worlds in collision.

So first I pour in some olive oil and give the pasta a stir. Next goes my bowl of everything ingredients, along with the liquids. Another stir. Finally, in goes about half of my pasta sauce. It's extra thick, remember? It's not about to lose its separate identity.

Time to plate my creation. I ladle over the top the remaining sauce. Now this is where most trendy restaurants dispense goat cheese from a chute that drops from the ceiling. I don't have any goat cheese in the house, but I have something better, fresh avocado. Beautiful mushy chunks of congealed California sunshine.

Some salad and bread and I'm good to go. Parmesan optional. Serves two.

So here I am with my everything pasta, savoring the profusion of flavors. The penne, soaking up all those liquids - yum. Some tomato pasta sauce taste competing with the olive oil and pan juices and the reduction, all coming at me from different directions - yum-yum. Sausage, mushroom, avocado - I've died and gone to heaven.

What's this? A new taste? I have a zucchini morsel in my mouth and it's - lemony. It's delicious! Better than delicious. This could make a vegetarian out of me. Anyone familiar with zucchini and its eggplant sibling knows these pathetic odes to precipitously bland are best buried under four pounds of cheese and tomato sauce. But little did we know. Little did we realize that all these years that this unprepossessing distant cousin of soylent green was Fred in search of Ginger.

I have a modest request for my burial. Let "Lemon Zucchini" be carved into my headstone. "Benefactor to Humanity" is redundant.