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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