Slow Cooker Bolognese Sauce

There was a time when I used to make spaghetti every Monday night. Even today, if I happen to be serving up any recipe involving pasta and spaghetti, Brian will ask, "is it Monday?" You know how most kids love "pasghetti"? - well, my Monday night dinner routine eventually made Brian decide he hated the stuff. Or so he said.

Sometimes I couldn't blame him for being less than ecstatic over Monday night meals. I had/have good recipes for homemade sauces but, when I was working on those Mondays, I sometimes cheated by buying the jars of pre-made sauces. I was always willing to buy whatever seemed the best, no matter the cost but, let's face it, store bought spaghetti sauce is never going to taste as good as what you make in your own home kitchen.

One of the things I really don't like about Ragu and all the other prepared brands is how much they don't absorb into the meat. Maybe this stemmed from not cooking patiently enough but, for whatever reason, I always felt that the sauce and meat were never truly blended together into one flavor unit. It was telling when a bit of the spaghetti meat would fall into the sink and with one bit of water immediately lose all sauce, reverting back to nothing more than browned ground beef. This is not exactly a recipe for a hearty flavor profile.

Obviously, if you cook a sauce and meat together all day, the two should truly blend in way more than a superficial, easy to wash off manner. That's exactly how it was with this bolognese sauce.
There were definitely some different components in this sauce. For instance, I've never put celery or carrot in my spaghetti sauce. The carrot was particularly worrisome. While it was simmering in the skillet, it seemed like an enormous amount of something just odd and visible enough to make Martin refuse to eat what I'd prepared.  As the sauce cooked through the hours, those carrots finally got absorbed into the body of the sauce such that all the orange was suddenly invisible, existing only as a flavor punch. Then there's the milk. I've never made a spaghetti sauce that included milk so I wondered if I was making a huge mistake in picking this recipe, but one taste quickly dispelled that worry. As with the carrots, all that milk finally got absorbed.

One more ingredient note should be mentioned - I loaded the recipe into my Paprika app on the iPad and then used that for a grocery list. When I got to the canned tomato aisle, I really thought it was a mistake that SIX fourteen oz. cans of tomato paste were needed. When you first dump the contents of your cans into the crock pot the meat is almost completely obliterated and for the first hours of cooking it seems as though the juices will never cook down enough to eliminate the runny-ness of so much liquid per can but in the end, everything evens out into one tasty sauce. That said, I might experiment with a little more meat next time.

I probably should have cut the ingredients in half as I have a huge amount left over. Hopefully it's a sauce that will freeze well. Maybe even long enough for some Monday night when Brian is home and I can give him a nostalgic surprise at dinner.


Slow Cooker Bolognese Sauce

Ingredients:
1 medium onion, finely chopped (1/2 cup)
1 stalk celery, finely chopped (1/2 cup)
1 carrot, finely chopped (3/4 cup)
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 1/2 pounds combined ground beef and pork, or meat-loaf mix (The store I visited doesn't do meat-loaf mix so I did a 70% to 30% ratio on beef to pork.)
1 cup milk
1 6-ounce can tomato paste
6 14-ounce cans diced tomatoes  (or 3  28 oz. cans!)
4 teaspoons kosher salt
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg

Directions:
In a large skillet, combine the onion, celery, carrot, and olive oil and cook over medium heat, stirring frequently, until tender, about 10 minutes.
Add the meat and cook, stirring frequently, until it loses its pink color. Add the milk. Increase heat to high and cook until the milk has evaporated. Transfer the mixture to a 4- to 6-quart slow cooker.
Return the skillet to the heat and add the tomato paste; cook over low heat to reduce its bitterness, about 5 minutes. Add the tomato paste to the cooker, along with the tomatoes, salt, and nutmeg.
NOTE: Midway through cooking, I felt the sauce tasted a little bitter so I added a bit of sugar. I have no idea how much. Maybe a teaspoon or tablespoon.
Cook on low for 8 hours, or on high for 4 hours