Recipe Trials – Week One

So I am starting this new thing…well Bryan and I are trying a new thing.  And it started this week.  Every week we will be cooking, one of us or both of us together, in order to have a home cooked meal, hopefully with many involving delicious leftovers, the trial and tribulations of new recipes, new found favorites, a shared dinner, conversation, and wine, and a lower eating out bill.

This week started off this little initiative, and boy did it start off with a bang!  I had received four cute little “party savor” bags of some homemade pasta, made and given out by the legendary Ethan Stowell chef from How to Cook a Wolf, which we dined at for Seattle Restaurant Week.  The pasta shape was a radiatori, which was new to me, considered a “lasagna pasta”, as its shape did resemble lasagna pasta along the edges a bit, cooked up large, fun and chewy as fresh, homemade pasta should.  This inspired the meal, as well as the sugo dishes that I have ordered or wanted to try out to restaurants recently.  Sugo, I have learned, means “stew” in Italian, and rightly so.  The recipe was super simple to make and if all of the “this is sooooo delicious” comments from the boy were an indication, it will be made again.  I present to you Radiatori al Sugo di Carne (or lasagna pasta with stew of meat):

Radiatori al Sugo di Carne

Ingredients:

• 1 lb beef roast of choice
• 1 can of diced tomatoes
• 1 can of whole tomatoes
• 6 cloves of garlic
• 1 cup of red wine
• 1 tsp of sugar (I added a little more)
• 1 tsp of salt (I added a little more)
• 1 lb of pasta

Directions:

• Put all ingredients except pasta in the slow cooker.  Cook on low for 8-10 hours.  At the end of cooking time shred beef very finely.  If you would like the sauce to reduce more remove the slow cooker lid for the last 30 minutes of cooking.  In the meantime cook the pasta.  Toss the pasta with sauce, serve in bowl, topped with shredded basil to make it pretty!!

We nearly polished off all of the pasta but I have a lot of the sugo remaining.  We had the pasta alongside simple steamed broccoli and the remaining Menage a Trois we used for the sauce. Buon appetito!!

Chelsea