Rotini bolognese

I've seen Bolognese sauce at restaurants before and usually just associate them with being a ground meat sauce.  I've never really had cravings for them.  I just thought they were tomato sauce with ground meat.

This recipe had much more flavor, even without the anchovy and porcini mushrooms.  The recipe called for these, but I didn't have any mushrooms since Mike hates mushrooms.  I also didn't know where to buy anchovy and didn't think Mike would touch this dish if it had anchovies in it.

I also have pancetta, so I used about 10 small pieces of thinly sliced ham that I had in the freezer.  I don't remember why I bought this ham.  Perhaps it was for Mike to make himself sandwiches for lunch?  It had been in the freezer for a while, so I wanted to use it.  I figured that pancetta is often described as being similar to ham, so why not sub ham for pancetta?

I was supposed to chop the carrots separately from the pancetta, mushrooms and anchovies, but since I was only going to process the carrots and ham, I just made them at the same time in the Vitamix.  Most of the carrots were finely chopped, but some did turn out a little big.  When I put the mixture in the Dutch oven, I just put the 2 or so pieces of carrots back in the Vitamix and chopped them up with the tomato sauce.

The dish was delicious, and a great way to cook carrots, since you really can't taste them!  I wasn't sure how long to cook the pasta, since I used Rotini instead of Linguini (which I didn't have).