Buffalo Pasta Sauce

I went to farmer and the cook tonight to pick up ingredients for dinner.  We have been sick for like 2 weeks in my house and i was tired of soup.  It felt like we needed more fortification.  Sometimes getting dinner stuff at FnC is hard.  They have the freshest most amazing local organic produce in town but the shelves are lacking the other stuff that I want.

I left with some frozen ground buffalo, kale, egg noodle pasta and a can of crushed tomatoes.

Here is what I did:

1. Defrosted buffalo meat under warm water.
2. Start pot of water to boil
3. In a heavy Crueset dutch oven like pot, heat some olive oil.
4. Break up buffalo meat and brown.  Grind some fresh pepper into the meat while browning
5. While meat is browning, find some bacon(!) in your fridge left over from the holidays.
6. Slice up 3 strips of bacon.  
7. While meat is still browning, mince up 1/2 a yellow onion and the rest of the carrots from Sunday's farmer's market.
8. When meat has browned, remove from pan and add bacon.  Cook up bacon until fat has been rendered and done to your liking.  Remove.
9. Add a little extra olive oil to pot and add onions and carrots.  (If I had had celery or fennel, I would have used some of that too.)  Stir and start the saute process.  Add your desired herbs and spices.  Tonight I had some fresh sage in the fridge so I minced up some of that and added dried thyme, Mexican oregano, red chili flakes.  Once the onions and carrots were browned, I poured a little port into pot to deglaze it.  (If wine were open, I would have used that).
10. I added the meats back in and mixed well, then added the tomato mixture back in.  
11. By this time the water was boiling, but I wanted the sauce to have a chance to meld, so I turned the water off.  
12. I found some sun dried tomatoes in the fridge, so I thinly sliced about 5 of those up and added them to the pan.  I added a little extra pepper flakes and ground pepper for more spice.
13. I thinly sliced up the beautiful amazing kale from Steve and added that and stirred it in.  (We need the Kale in this house for fortification).
14. Turned the water back on.  That egg pasta cooks in 4 minutes.
15. I tossed the egg pasta with a little butter (this is totally cheating).  And served the pasta with a little splash of olive oil and Parmesan for grating.

Both Geordie and Eric liked it.  I did too.