pasta sauce - anything and everything

One of the greatest things about pasta sauce is that you can so mess with it. You can do whatever you want. It can be as simple as olive oil and grated cheese or a complicated ragu that has a list of 20 ingredients and has to simmer for hours on end. It's all good. It's all great, in fact.  Take veggies for instance...

My favorite thing lately is veggies. We get this farmer co-op basket of fruit and veggies every week (and yes, that cauliflower is as big as my daughter's head) and it is great but one thing about it is we never know what we are going to get. Whatever is in season is what we eat. Kind of fun but definitely challenging. What do I do with it all?  Pasta sauce takes it all. (Except for the beets, I don't know what to do with those things...yet.) The givens - tomatoes, bell peppers, broccoli, cauliflower - all good.  Squash, both summer and winter varieties - all good (and spaghetti squash even makes a good "pasta"). Spinach, kale, collard greens, all the hearty greens - all good. Carrots, parsnips, turnips, fennel bulbs - great. All of the onion and garlic varieties - awesome. Almost any vegetable can be incorporated into a pasta sauce.

Here are some things that go great together:

Sweeter squashes, like butternut, and carrots go great in a seafood sauce. I think it works best if you grate it raw and add it straight to the sauce.

Hearty greens go great with sausage.

Turnips (who would have thought?) are great with ground beef or sausage or all veggie red sauces. I just cut them up into small cubes but I would think you could grate them too.

Fennel is one of my new favorite things. It has a kind of black licorice-y flavor that you wouldnt think would work all that well but it is fantastic. The bulb has a milder flavor and is great in any sauce, red or white. Fennel seed has a much stronger flavor and is amazing with pork sausage in a red sauce.

Possibilities are endless!

Next up - the simplest sauces.