Cavatelli with Ragu Bianco, Wild Mushrooms, & Pecorino

Soupereasy and I pretty much fell in love with this recipe. It's not that it's perfect for the home cook as written ... it's that the flavor of the completed dish is just so spot on. Delicious and different in a good way.

This is a chicken ragu combining a pound of chicken thighs, 4 oz. chicken livers, and two ounces of pancetta. All the meat is cut into about 1/2 inch dice, combined in a bowl and salted (we used less salt because our pancetta was pre-seasoned with garlic & herbs), then put through a meat grinder. Which took forever because we don't have the industrial strength grinder that Nate Appleman has access to.

Once ground, the meat is combined with sauteed onion and fennel; the recipe calls for 1 red onion and 1/2 fennel bulb -- but there is a lot of size variation in those two things, so we diced a medium red onion and then enough fennel to equal the amount of onion.

After the meat is cooked, the pan is deglazed with some white wine after which 1/2 cup of water is added along with a bay leaf and some rosemary. You cook the mix over low heat for 40-60 minutes, stirring often. As there is not much liquid in the ragu, the frequent stirring is a good idea.

Toward the end of the cooking time, the mushrooms (we used a wild mushroom mix from Whole Foods because I couldn't seem to find the suggested fresh chanterelles or porcini anywhere) are sauteed and then stirred into the ragu. At this point, the pasta can be prepared -- we used a chubby tubular pasta rather than the cavatellli --reserving some of the pasta water for "loosening" the sauce. We definitely needed the water since our ragu did not have a very sauce-like consistency. The dish is then plated, drizzled with EVOO and an aged pecorino romano is grated over the the pasta.

The finished dish wasn't pretty ... but it was delicious. And as we ate it, Soupereasy and I agreed that this dish -- with a few modifications could be a dynamite and budget-friendly weeknight dinner. We plan to try the dish again with the following modifications:

1)After dicing the meats, combine them in a food processor rather than a meat grinder to get a finer meat blend. This should also give a more sauce like consistency that would go very nicely with paparadelle or even fettucini.
2) We'll add a bit more liquid for the 40-60 minute simmer and/or more pasta water at the end. 3) Neither of us felt the need for thte fancy mushrooms here -- we both think cremini would work just fine.