Comfort me with meat and tomatoes

I went to Siesel’s today. I love going to good butcher shops. So many great cuts of meat, plus my curiosity is always piqued by relatively exotic (to me) offerings like pigs’ feet, duck (love it, never made it), and rabbit. I lingered in front of the “exotics” for a while, but I didn’t have the wherewithal to make such a purchase without a plan, so I deferred to the more familiar (and relatively very boring) ground sirlon.

Ground beef in hand, I went home, poked around the pantry, and settled on spaghetti with meat sauce. Wow… take a boring meat, make a boring meal? Au contraire! Like a baby you won’t give a name to before you see, so with this pasta. It’s different every time. This one, I’m calling “Capsaicino”.

Pasta sauce…it’s not hard to make a decent sauce at home in a relatively short period of time. I’ve picked up two tricks, I’m sure there are more. One, use olive oil in your sauce. Two, save some of the cooking liquid from the pasta. When everything is ready, don’t just pile pasta on plates and ladle sauce on top. It needs to be brought together. Instead, mix your cooked pasta, the sauce, plus about 1/4-1/2 c. pasta water (start with a little, add more as needed), and about 3T olive oil together in a suitably-sized pot, cook together for about 5 min over medium heat. You can add cheese at this point, too. That pasta water helps the sauce stick to the pasta, and the oil makes it taste good.

There are infinite variations on this recipe, play with it to make it your own. Here’s the basics to get your creative juices flowing. A note about portion size: this feeds me, with enough leftover for about 2 more meals. I like my pasta saucy- it’s more about the meat and tomatoes than the pasta the way I make it. Depending on your own preferences, modify accordingly. It can easily be doubled, but you’ll need a stockpot for the sauce rather than a 12” frying pan. The other benefit about this one is that you don’t have to do a lot of mise en place- it’s very forgiving, you can prep ingredients as you go.

First, set a pot of water to boil. While it heats, prepare the sauce.

Throw the ground beef (1/2 lb) into a large frying pan over medium high heat to brown. While it cooks, chop an onion. Stir the beef occasionally, adding salt and pepper to taste, plus a generous sprinkling of red pepper flakes.

When the beef is browned and no longer pink, transfer it to a plate lined with paper towels. Wipe the grease out of the frying pan with a paper towel. If there’s lots of stuck-on bits, you can deglaze the pan with 1T stock or water, boiling it for a minute or so. Add 1 T olive oil and the onion (I had about 1c onion, you don’t have to measure). Cook the onions until they are soft and lightly browned. While the onion cooks, slice cremini mushrooms- I had about 1.5 c, sliced. Add those to the pan once the onions are browned. Cook until they become very soft and release their juices. You know you’re ready to proceed when it looks like you’ve got a lot less mushroom than you added.

Add the contents of one 28-oz can of chopped tomatoes with their juice to the pan, 1 T tomato paste, a drizzle of olive oil, 1 tsp kosher salt, lots of ground black pepper, and more red pepper flakes- about 1/4-1/2 tsp or more if you love your spice. I had fresh rosemary, so I tore up about 2 tsp of that, added that to the sauce along with about 1/2 tsp dried oregano. Feel free to experiment with herbs in the rosemary, oregano, basil, thyme, marjoram group. You can use them combination, just try to keep it about 1/2 tsp dry or 1 T. fresh for this amount of sauce. If you’ve got dry (not oil-packed) sundried tomatoes, you can use them in this dish, too. Slice them thin and add them with the tomatoes.

Let that simmer over low heat to meld the flavors. In the meantime, salt your boiling water and add dried pasta (I used about 1/2 lb).

When the pasta is cooked, drain it, reserving about 1 c. of the pasta water, and add the pasta to the sauce. Finish as described above. This makes a good, spicy meat sauce. It also works well using half ground beef, half sausage- remove it from its casing and cook with the beef. If you don’t like spice, skip the red pepper, or use a light hand there.

The real secret about this dish? I like it with a glass of milk. I once told this to Valentina. She indicated this would not win over any Italian, and advised me to keep such information to myself.