Bolognese Sauce Doctor'd Up

I've been becoming a regular at the West Hartford Farmer's Market. One of the items I've been eyeing on my visits is Sankow's Beaver Brook Farm's Bolognaise Sauce. For a mere ten bucks you can have one quart of sauce that includes ground lamb, tomatoes, onions, celery, carrots red wine, extra virgin olive oil, lamb stock, garlic, spices and salt.

While I prefer the Italian "Bolognese" to the French "Bolognaise" I was still intrigued and decided to treat myself. How bad could it be?

As my salted water was bubbling away, I started to heat up the sauce and once warm gave it a taste. It was a bit sweet for my palate and finally determined it was the large amount of carrots that were adding an overpowering sweetness of the sauce. I decided to add a can of tomatoes and season generously with salt, pepper, crushed red pepper and nutmeg. After the flavors began to settle and the rigatoni was cooking away, I still needed to add something else to the sauce and was kicking myself for not buying tomato paste on my last trip to the supermarket!

What else can thicken this up and off set the sweetness? After combing through my pantry and fridge, I finally decided to throw in some eggplant I had roasted the day before. What do I have to lose?

It wound up being a pretty successful experiment and after a liberal helping of grated cheese I had a delightful meal whose depth of flavor was even more pronounced on the next day when I heated up some pasta for lunch.

West Hartford Farmer's Market

Not quite the Union Square Greenmarket but at least there is a farmer's market! Yes, life in surburbia makes me grateful for whatever culinary gifts I receive.

After perusing the few stalls mainly filled with plants, I managed to taste some lovely cow's cheese and purchased two varieties of cucumbers: lemon and verbina.

The woman running the stand suggested trying these odd shaped lemon cucs chopped up in a tuna salad and I think add some capers, salt, pepper and mustard and call it a day! I am expecting a slightly tart taste to them when I finally get to chopping.

I also bought some verbena cucumbers which are apparently used for pickling. I had one verbena with some pickled beets and goat cheese over mesclun greens and then in a simple salad of cucumber, grape tomatoes, olive oil and balsamic vinegar. The verbenas were firm and fresh and not bad for 50 cents.

Not too shabby as I've only begun to get a taste of Connecticut produce!