Since I usually cook for one, I am always looking for recipes that will help me use up extra ingredients from other meals. This pasta sauce is basically a simple bolognese sauce, but when I tried to look up bolognese sauces in my cookbooks, they called for lots of extra ingredients that I didn’t have, so I decided to make it up.
I know this is a pretty basic recipe, but I had fun with it, especially using up my leftovers.
Tonight I had several things in my fridge that needed to be used up:
ground beef
mushrooms
half an onion
three slices of pancetta (you can definitely use normal bacon as well)
to this ingredient list I added:
1 can of tomato sauce (you could also use any sauce from a bottle, Classico etc), olive oil, sea salt, pepper, half a box of pasta, and a few red pepper flakes.
First I chopped up the onion and minced some shallots. Shallots are great to use in pasta sauces that you have to simmer because they give a similar taste to garlic but they don’t burn as easily. I sauteed the onions and shallots with some olive oil and waited until the onions turned translucent. Then I added the mushrooms. After sauteeing the mushrooms until they were cooked, but not completely, I added the ground beef.
I should add that while these things were sauteeing, I started the water for the pasta and fried the pancetta in the microwave. I could have fried the pancetta with my onions and shallots, but I was worried about all the fat affecting the taste of the mushrooms. I also have a smallish stove and needed the workspace! I chopped up the pancetta and added it to the beef, onions and mushrooms.
After cooking the beef for a bit I opened the can of sauce and put it in a pot. I turned the heat on low and let the sauce heat up a bit. After making sure the beef was fully cooked I took the whole beef, mushroom, onion mixture and transferred it with a slotted spoon to the sauce. Beef creates a lot of juices which don’t always make your sauce taste that good! A little is okay, but don’t overdo it.
I let the sauce simmer for a good 15 mins. In theory, sauce can simmer for much longer, especially if it is in larger quanities, but I didn’t have that much time tonight. I added the red pepper flakes to the sauce and tasted it to see if it needed a bit more pepper (it did!).
After draining the pasta and checking the sauce one more time, I combined and enjoyed my meal! I had enough for dinner and enough for lunch tomorrow, which to me is the perfect recipe!
