Italian-Style Chili Mac

I know it's been a while since I've posted but meetings and traveling makes me a busy person. Due to extreme weather this past weekend, my flight from LA to Philly was delayed by 4 hours. Snow in Denver, it's a killer. So what was already going to be a long flight turned into a REALLY long flight. We landed at 3am then with the 3 hour drive, made it back into town around 6. Boo. After a few hours sleep, I made myself wake up at 10am.

I was pretty much spent the rest of the day and going out of the house to the store was out of the question. Therefore, diving into the freezer and pantry is the name of the game. I had frozen beef, canned tomatoes and pasta. My first thought was a meat sauce over pasta. So I started like I usually do - saute chopped onions, carrots, celery and brown ground beef (don't forget the salt) . Add a couple of tablespoons of tomato paste to the pot and saute until fragrant. Add some garlic. Then add 1 28 oz can of whole tomatoes and 1 16 oz jar of homemade tomato sauce (thanks to Ann for the sauce!!). Break up the tomatoes and the beef with a potato masher. I used tomatoes from Trader Joe's and I was NOT happy with them. There were skins on my tomatoes!!! Boo.

For some sweetness, I added some PA table wine (always tends to be on the sweet side) and Italian seasoning. Since I was bumming around the house, I let this simmer for an hour and reduce. After that, I tasted the sauce for seasoning and added salt and sugar. At this point, I was just going to package up the sauce and serve it over spaghetti or something later in the week. Then I looked more closely at my pantry and found alphabet shaped pasta. So I thought adding the pasta directly to the sauce to cook would make this somewhat like a one pot meal. I cooked the pasta according to package directions and voila! Dinner!

I call this creation Italian-style Chili Mac because Chili Mac is made with a base of chili then you add macaroni to cook into the chili. So this is similar to that. I was tasty and the alphabet pasta was cute. All in all very yummy! Score for a stocked pantry!!