BologNO Sauce

Recipe: Bolognese Sauce
Source: http://thepioneerwoman.com/cooking/2009/05/ryans-bolognese-sauce/
Time: 1 hour (includes 30 minute cook time)
Ease: 4
Taste: 4
Leftover Value: 2 (I have some in the freezer, so we'll see what that's like when I brave thawing it and using it)
Down the Drain or Keep in the Strainer: Down the Drain!

I hate when a recipe looks so wonderful....

and turns out to be crap.

I'm sorry to use such strong language here.  

But that's how I felt.

And I'm a girl who says what she feels.*

*It is one of my greatest downfalls.

Usually Pioneer Woman doesn't do me wrong, but this recipe was a major downer to a highly productive snow day stuck inside.  

The beginning step of frying carrots and onions together was pretty much my everyday clothing choice color combination, so I was a little partial to its beauty.

Then I wondered how on earth carrots equated to tomato sauce, but they had worked so well in my tomato soup, that I pushed all doubt aside and trusted them to work for bolognese sauce.*

*This was my first mistake.

Foolish, foolish girl.  I know.

My second mistake was that I trusted wine to make everything better.  

I thought the technique of making a 'well' for adding ingredients, while picturesque for my bazillion ridiculous shots, was simply a fancy way to add ingredients.  Pretty much any ingredient that was added needed to be added into a well.  Perhaps I will learn one day the importance of such a technique, if there even is one.

At the tomato point, I still believed in the dream that was the deliciousness of this recipe.  I still couldn't see how anything containing ground beef + wine + tomatoes could possibly go wrong.

I closed the lid to let the mixture simmer and crossed my fingers, hoping that the magic sauce fairy would transform what I was already sensing to be a down the drain recipe into something indescribably delicious.

It certainly wasn't indescribable.  It was, in a word, bland.  It was a lot of effort for a watery sauce which lacked seasoning and that 'wow!' factor that all sauces should hold.