Taglitelle with Sicilian Meat Sauce

This summer I had the great pleasure of traveling to Sicily for a holiday. I ate so many amazing foods, and some of the best were at Resort Borgo san Rocco in Sicily, where I was able to spend some time in the kitchen. I got to make a whole lot of tagliatelle pasta (recipe to come one day!), and I also got to watch a whole lot of other foods being created.

For this meat sauce I did my best to remember what they put in and the method they used. I know that my recipe isn’t quite the same, since I can’t remember everything, and I’m sure the meat is a little different, but this turned out to be a really really tasty sauce nonetheless.

This isn’t a difficult sauce to make, but you do need quite a bit of time for it to cook down and let the flavours mingle, so I started about two hours before I was serving dinner. Alternatively, it could be made a day ahead of time.

What you need:

• extra virgin olive oil
• 1 onion
• 3 cloves garlic
• 1 carrot
• 1 stalk celery
• 3 mild Italian sausages (I bought these at Bosa Foods in Vancouver)
• 500 grams, or so, of beef short ribs
• 1-680mL jar tomato Passata
• 1/2 bottle of a decent red wine
• salt and pepper to taste
• Parmesan or Pecorinco cheese for serving

What you do:

1. Chop the celery and carrot into chunks that are about 3 cm long. Chop the onion and garlic. Heat a large pot on medium-high and add a few glugs of olive oil. Add the veggies and whole sausages, and sauté them for about 5 minutes.
2. Add the beef and continue to cook for about 5 more minutes.
3. Add the Passata and wine. Add a little water to the Passata jar and give it a little shake to get all the tomato out of the jar; add this to the pot. Heat to bubbling, then let it sit on low heat, stirring from time to time, for an hour and a half to two hours.
4. Remove the sausages and beef from the sauce. Use the back of a wooden spoon to crush the carrot and celery, then stir it into the sauce.
5. Cut the sausage into bite-sized chunks. Remove the beef from the bone and pull it into bite-sized pieces. Add the meat back to the pot and let it heat up again.
6. Salt and pepper to taste.
7. Cook your pasta and toss it with some of the sauce. Grate some cheese on top and enjoy!