Two New Things For Dinner

      It's pasta in tomato sauce, so (for me, at least) it was a can't-miss experiment.

      Our corner store started carrying a "Truffle and Tomato" pasta sauce.  Anything with truffles as an ingredient will catch my eye; I love 'em.  I'd like them more if they didn't cost so much, but the Sanremo brand sauce was reasonably priced (better than what I'm finding online).  I bought a bottle awhile back and I've been waiting for a chance to try it.

      Another food that got my attention was fregula pasta: like tiny dumplings or oversized, rough-textured couscous, it gets roasted a bit when it is made.  Most recipes have you cooking it right in the sauce or soup.  Cooked, each noodle is about the size of a kernel of maize.

      Ended up with both the tiny noodles and the fancy sauce in my larder and gave it the usual treatment: some sauteed vegetables (half an onion, celery, half a green bell pepper, all diced small), some nice king trumpet mushrooms cut up to match and a little ground meat (beef, because I found one more frozen-for-later).  Veggies and mushrooms saute first, then get set aside while the beef (with a pinch of salt and some Italian seasoning mix for luck) gets browned and well-drained (and drained again).  I added vegetables, etc. to the meat, poured the sauce over that, rinsed the bottle with a very small amount of hot water and poured that on (it'll steam away -- I used to use a tiny bit of good chianti).  I also started the electric teakettle, because I'm sneaky.

      Covered the pan and let it come up to bubbling.  Once it looked happy and kept simmering even when stirred, I added a guess at enough pasta to the center, and a little more (maybe a quarter to a third of a cup total?), and then sloshed a little boiling water from the kettle over it to give it a good start.  That steamed up nicely; I stirred everything together, gave it a one-over and covered the pan again, setting the heat so it would just simmer.  The Always pan (no, they still don't pay me) has a kind of adjustable vent, which I set wide open so the excess water would go up in steam. 

      Fregula are tough.  The bag said 14-17 minutes in water.  I gave it ten, looked it over, fished one out to bite and let it go it four more, which seemed to do the trick.

      The end result was thick, really flavorful, and just about addictive.  The truffle flavor came through without being overpowering and the fregula made it toothsome and held the sauce together.  If you like pasta but struggle with long noodles or the wiggly short ones, give it a try!  As for truffles, well, either you like them or you don't, and you're either willing to pay extra for 'em or you aren't.  Or you're like me, and truffle-flavored things are an occasional treat.  Purists may object to the extras I add to the sauce, but it's how I grew up eating spaghetti.*  YMMV and there's nothing wrong with having the other components of the meal on the side instead.
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* I don't think we had marinara-type sauce with anything except spaghetti noodles when I was a child.  Lasagna was an occasional special treat.  Elbow macaroni went into Midwestern chili and mac'n'cheese, and plain rotini (or, rarely, other short shapes) with salt, pepper and butter was pretty common at dinnertime.