Error: I'm afraid this is the first I've heard of a "trackback" flavoured Blosxom. Try dropping the "/+trackback" bit from the end of the URL.
Red Sauce
Today instead of making my usual microwave red sauce, I'm making a more traditional sauce. I'm using the bottom of the 6 quart enameled dutch oven, and I'm very pleased with it.
Getting the sauce out of the pot later may be a trick, considering how heavy the pot is. Incentive to get back to the free weights.
Instead of canned mushrooms and chipped garlic and onions, I'm using live ones and practicing my knife skills. So, setting up the mise en place --
Set the pot on a medium low burner.
Light a votive candle next to where you will be chopping the onion.
Get out the dried herbs and spices: bay leaf, parsley flakes, sage, rosemary, thyme, oregano, marjoram, fennel seeds. Whomp everything except the parsley flakes and bay leaf in the marble spice mortar before putting them in a small bowl.
Add extra virgin olive oil to the pot (don't put anything else in yet.
Mince 4 garlic cloves and put them into a tiny bowl.
Chop a medium onion into small dice and put it into the pot. (Note: the combination of letting the candle burn for a while before working on the onion and not cutting the onion root too enthusiastically worked very well. I could actually see the whole time I was cutting the onion.)
Rinse and stem 8 ounces of fresh mushrooms and run them through an egg slicer.
Open a can of organic diced tomatoes into a strainer over a bowl.
Continue sweating the onions until they are mostly soft, then add the garlic and let them sweat together for a few minutes.
Put a pound of ground buffalo into a bowl and tear it apart into small pieces with two forks. Put the meat into the pot and let it brown.
Add the herbs and stir them through the meat.
Add the mushrooms and put the lid on the pot for a couple of minutes. Then take the lid off for a few minutes to allow some of the liquid to evaporate.
Deglaze with a 187 ml bottle of Vendage 2000 Cabernet. Leave the lid off the pot so the liquid can cook down and be absorbed.
Stir in the diced tomatoes. let them cook for a few minutes.
Add two 6 oz. cans of tomato paste. Stir well to coat the chunks of meat, then add a 15 oz. can of tomato sauce. Stir thoroughly again. (One nice thing about cooking in a deep pot is that it's easy to stir things without them spattering everywhere.)
Lid briefly to bring the sauce up to temperature, stir and turn heat to low. Taste, and add a little kosher salt, if needed.
[While the sauce is cooking, put the juice drained from the diced tomatoes into a cup, add a few drops of Worcestershire, and nuke it. Yum.]
Now to choose the pasta to put it on... maybe some ziti: this is a robust sauce. I'm currently using some imported organic pasta that Costco had in stock. In the past, I've tried whole wheat pasta, but it never really tasted right. I'll take organic over whole wheat at this point. (I stopped gaining weight around the time I switched back to non-whole wheat pasta, which seems weird...)
In the future (when I have used up the cans of sauce in my pantry -- sometimes shopping at Costco can be a disadvantage) I will switch to using 2 cans of the diced tomatoes with their juice, without the can of sauce. Unless Costco starts carrying an organic sauce with more structure than the Contadina.
This current recipe swaps the wine for the diced tomato juice to make the flavors of the saucemore complex (some tomato flavors are alcohol-soluble). Also, to some extent, the olive oil replaces some of the fat that would be present if I were using beef instead of buffalo.
I did not add much salt to the sauce because I salt the pasta water, and usually serve it with grated parmesan. For this sauce, I will breakout the real, grate-it-yourself stuff.
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