Today is a good day because I’m sharing another yummy meal with you! This is another recipe from the Thug Kitchen cookbook – see the whole collection here 🙂 .

I’ve made all sorts of pasta sauces – using lentils, real ground beef, other vegetables – but I’ve never tried using chickpeas. I’m pleased to say, that it works wonderfully! Giving them a couple pulses in a food processor makes the perfect size and texture for a pasta sauce like this.

There was a variety of vegetables along with the chickpeas – onion, carrot, celery, zucchini (instead of mushrooms) – which added lots of colour and nutrition. Of course, all the vegetables gave lots of texture to the sauce, too.

The secret ingredient that I’ve never used in a pasta sauce was the red wine. The recipe says you can use broth in its place, but the wine gives a better depth of flavour, so I’m glad I tried it.

This bolognese sauce was so good on its own, I could probably just eat a bowl of it. But here, I did serve it on some whole wheat penne, which I think actually worked out better than any long pasta. The sauce got in all the little tubes and coated it wonderfully.

This got almost fully eaten in one meal, but if you don’t have so many hungry people to feed, you can always put extra sauce (sans pasta) in a container and freeze it for later.