Il Mezzaluna Pasta Sauce

Il Mezzaluna Pasta Sauce is inspired by a pasta dish at a restaurant in Dublin.  We had the fortunate opportunity to visit Dublin several times for business and enjoy Dublin’s lively restaurant scene for dinners.  The majority of the restaurants featured very good Irish cuisine and very social pub cuisine; there were also the usual inexpensive Chinese restaurants and pizza joints.  We were surprised to find a few Italian restaurants and one stood out to us due to its ungrammatical name: Il Mezzaluna.  In Italian, mezzaluna (half-moon) is a feminine noun and its article should be La not Il, which is used for masculine nouns.  We also found an unusual pasta sauce on its menu which was tomato-based but featured salami; we’d never encountered this combination before.  Being adventurous diners, we tried it and enjoyed it too!  So, we present our recreation, from memory, of this sauce, which we call Il Mezzaluna Pasta Sauce.  Zesty and robust, enjoy it over your favorite pasta, accompanied by an equally robust dry red wine.  Serve our Peaches in Red Wine for dessert and make it an all red wine dinner.

Prep Time: 30 minutes, Total Time: 1 hour. Serves 4.

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Ingredients:

• 3 Tbs Extra Virgin Olive Oil
• 1 Tb minced Garlic
• 1 ½ cups diced Yellow/Brown/White Onion
• 1 tsp Crushed Red Pepper flakes
• 1 cup finely diced Hard Salami
• 1 ½ tsp dried Oregano leaves
• 1 ½ tsp dried Thyme leaves
• ½ cup dry Red Wine
• 2 cups Crushed Tomatoes

Preparation:

1. Pour the extra virgin olive oil into a 2-quart saucepan over a medium-high heat.
2. When the oil is hot, add the garlic, onion and red pepper flakes to the saucepan, stir and sauté uncovered until the onion softens and becomes translucent.
3. Add the salami, oregano, and thyme to the saucepan; stir, cover and cook for 5 minutes.
4. Pour the red wine into the saucepan, stir to mix with the other ingredients and cook uncovered until the wine is reduced by half.
5. Add the crushed tomatoes to the saucepan, stir, and cook uncovered for 10 minutes, then cover and remove the sauce from the heat.
6. Serve Il Mezzaluna Pasta Sauce over your favorite pasta and dress with grated Parmesan and Romano cheeses at the table.