Lamb ragù with rigatoni (var. beef)

In an effort to diversify our recipe repertoire, I purchased The Dinnertime Survival Cookbook (after having tested some recipes from the library's copy, of course).  We've had success with a few of its recipes, but then I started to notice that we were only making those few dishes.  So we decided to make something different: lamb ragù with rigatoni.

We quickly discovered that the Foxborough Trader Joe's (right next to Gillette Stadium!!) doesn't carry ground lamb, so we bought beef instead, and rather hilariously, we didn't even buy ground beef (personal preference).  I realize this may have changed the final product rather a lot.*  But they had everything else we needed, including a bottle of inexpensive but quality red wine.  Massachusetts grocery stores >> Rhode Island grocery stores.

This turned out to be a very tasty red; it was a lot smoother than many other reds (which I prefer).  Trader Joe's FTW!

From a cursory read-through of the recipe, I knew that this one would take rather a while: definitely a weekend meal despite the cookbook author claiming that it could be done on a weeknight ("It cooks in 45 minutes!" for me means "You will be chopping things for 30 minutes, THEN cooking for 45 minutes!").  But even so, we started chopping things around 5:30 and didn't eat until just past 7.  Didn't budget the time well on that one.

Once we got the stove going, the sauce looked great.  Beef, onions, celery, carrots: deglazed with some red wine, this was starting to look more like a French beef stew than an Italian pasta sauce (though I have since learned that this is the traditional method for preparing a ragù alla bolognese).

I'd added the wine a few minutes prior to taking the photo; it was already tasty at this point.

Then the recipe told us to add 1 cup of canned whole tomatoes + 1/2 cup of the juices, then a cup and a half of chicken stock, followed by a covered simmer for 45 minutes.  This made the sauce look more like a soup, so I left the pot uncovered for the 45 minutes.  This thickened the sauce, but I would still reduce the amount of chicken stock to 1 cup at most and simmer with the lid on.

The ragù just after adding the tomatoes, juice, and broth.  Soup, or sauce for pasta?

The ragù after trying to get it to reduce.

The finished product was incredibly tasty even though we hadn't followed the original recipe to the letter.  It was not overly tomato-y; there were enough other flavors like rosemary, bay leaf, thyme, and cumin that no single flavour dominated the dish, and the carrots added just a bit of sweetness.  If anything, I would swap out the cumin (the cookbook author loves that cumin) for a pinch of nutmeg instead, but that is just my personal preference.

This is definitely something we would make again, but only on weekends unless I can improve my knife skills** enough to make this on a weeknight.  I'd like to see what it would taste like with the original main ingredient, but this beef variation was excellent.

A recipe to keep!  We made this with rigatoni bought from Trader Joe's.  It's somehow thicker than the Barilla or Mueller's rigatoni and stood up well to the chunky sauce.

The Dinnertime Survival Cookbook (2013), p. 148-149

*This is, in fact, reminiscent of a recent experience at a local Szechwan restaurant.  Our party wanted to order "Chinese broccoli with chicken".  Our waiter kindly let us know, though, that the restaurant didn't have any Chinese broccoli that evening; moreover, because of a printing error, it wasn't broccoli in the dish, it was cauliflower; and then it wasn't chicken, but pork.  Cauliflower with pork?  Almost, but not quite, entirely unlike Chinese broccoli with chicken!

**I have almost, almost resisted the urge to use the word "sharpen" in relation to improving my knife skills.