Monday, December 20, 2010

Rigatoni with Vegetable Bolognese

Another recipe from New Italian Favorites, featuring a vegetarian option with dried porcini mushrooms, carrots, onions, peppers, and red wine.  This was also the first recipe where I was able to use a newly purchased food processor!  In my experimentation with how to use it, I was determined to chop everything in this recipe with it.  I failed.

The recipe called for chopped thyme and oregano; unfortunately, herbs in such small quantities don't have enough weight for the spinning blades to actually chop them.  Luckily, the vegetables that the recipe called for chopping chopped fine, if not a little too fine.  One of the things I noticed consistently was that the food processor chopped everything into salsa-like bits, which is great...if you're trying to make salsa.  However, since I'm not making salsa, it's kind of a problem.

One of the new ingredients of which I had the pleasure of cooking with was dried porcini mushrooms.  They smelled like dog food, and when I soaked them in water as per instructions, it made the smell worse.

After all the prep, I cooked the vegetables and herbs until they were soft and tender.  Then, I added the drained porcini mushrooms and fresh mushrooms, and continued to cook.  Then, to complete the sauce, I added the mushroom liquid and red wine.  The dish was complete by mixing in pasta.



The taste of the vegetable mix was very interesting (the good kind of interesting).  I want to retry this recipe, but not using the food processor, so I might be able to taste more of the individual ingredients; otherwise, it's pretty close to being a final recipe for me.

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