The first meal I ever cooked for Esteban was a re-creation of my mother's spaghetti sauce. It was, well, kind of a disaster, in a wacky hijinx kind of sitcom way. One of the first meals he ever made for me involved an enormous pot of overcooked spiral pasta, ground beef and so much Kitchen Bouquet that the entire thing tasted like industrial sludge.

Since then, we've gotten a lot better in the kitchen and Esteban has absolutely perfected several dishes, so I leave all manner of Italian or tomato-based dishes to him, because his ragu sauce is unbelievably amazing. Bonus: unlike me, he never ever messes up the angel hair pasta. He doesn't follow recipes, so each batch is a new discovery, a little unpredictable and sometimes widely varying, depending on what we have in the house. Sometimes he uses portobello mushrooms, sautéed in garlic, olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Sometimes he throws vodka or whiskey into the sauce, sometimes there's tofu instead of meat. Sometimes he cooks pepperoni until it has the consistency of crispy bacon and then crumbles it into the sauce for these little spicy flavor bombs that make my mouth happy. You never know what you're going to get, but sometimes, like last week, his 7-quart batch is so amazing that I eat nothing else until it is gone and then go to the store to buy more ground round and tomato sauce so that he can turn around and do it again.