What do you do about dinner when you’ve just had “one of those days”? When you’re too mentally exhausted to be culinarily inspired and too physically worn out to cook anything elaborate anyway? When it’s dark and windy out and you don’t really fancy trekking down the street to the supermarket?

Well, you could get a take-away. But if, like me, you also happen to have a fridge overflowing with random odds and ends that are on their last legs, you could make “clean out the refrigerator” pasta—which was actually yummier than it sounds.

I had two little tubs of cherry tomatoes, one of which I bought the day before the other one showed up in my veg box. I had half of a rather large zucchini left over from Sunday’s roast chicken with sautéed zucchini and lemony broad beans. I had the remnants of a tub of marinated grilled artichoke hearts (oh how I love them) from the ham and artichoke pizza I made on Friday. And I had a handful of black olives and the tail end of a head of garlic.

I cut the tomatoes in half, coarsely chopped the zucchini, finely chopped the garlic, sliced up the artichokes, and tossed them all into a baking dish with the olives, a sprinkle of fennel seeds, some sea salt and black pepper, a splash of good balsamic vinegar, and a hefty drizzle of extra virgin olive oil. Then I shoved the dish in the oven and roasted everything for as long as it took me to boil up some pasta and throw together a salad using the other veggies languishing in my fridge: some (thankfully hardy) Little Gem lettuces and some sweet spring onions.

When the roasted veggies had gone all tender and juicy, I took them out, mixed them with my pasta, and served it all up with a snowy topping of freshly grated parmesan and a rustic Valpolicella that I grabbed from the wine shop across the street.

And voilà, a cozy, tasty Italian meal that used up those odds and ends and took all of half an hour to make from start to finish. Sometimes things just work out like that.