the milk in the spaghetti idea isn't sitting well with me though

Try it, you'll like it. It isn't enough to even make the sauce creamy. I saw this thread this a.m. and I started chopping carrots and celery about an hour ago and stopped because I realize I don't have any onions and I don't feel like going out into the 90 degree heat. I was thinking about trying this sauce with lasagne.

I can see the carrots and celery.. mmm..

The milk and tomatoes.. seems really odd and out of this world..

you've never had tomato cream sauce over pasta? Or creamy tomato soup?

SO YUMMY!

And, IIRC, pink vodka sauce, in addition to crushed tomatoes, contains as much heavy cream as it does vodka.

Yes I have.. many occassions at restaurants that have a soup of the day and serving cream of tomato or something similar..

I prefer having cream of whatever that appears off white or something

This isn't really a ragu but it's really simple.

1. Buy canned, whole tomatoes (~3 cans). Some fresh ones too.
2. Preheat oven to 500-550F.
3. Halve and seed all of them. Set aside a couple unseeded. DO NOT THROW AWAY THE JUICE FROM THE CAN.
4. Lay them down, inside up, in a roasting pan, salt, and pepper. Sprinkle with olive oil and add herbs to taste.
5. Roast the living daylights out of them. Takes about an hour.
6. While that's going, take the juice from the canned tomatoes and some red wine, and put into a saucepan. Reduce. Slice the tomatoes you set aside and set aside again.
7. Pull tomatoes out of the oven. Dump into large pot. Add the fresh tomatoes and reduction, then blend using a stick blender.

If I have time or the energy to do a proper bolognese, on top of the above procedure I would:
1.Sautee ground beef and mushrooms. Sautee some pancetta to go with it if I remember to pick it up at the store. Set aside.
2. Sautee mire poix (by the way, they sell the stuff pre-chopped at Trader Joe's) in some butter. Dump the fresh tomatoes in here. Dump in the meat and mushroom mixture. Dump in enough chicken broth to cover. Put in tomato paste. Stir. Simmer until tomato mixture is ready.
3. Dump the ground tomato mixture into what is now sort of a "stew". Add fresh basil and oregano. Add a bit of heavy cream and parmesan cheese. Simmer, stirring constantly.

Couple things:
1. Season as you go. Salt/pepper goes without saying.
2. Taste, taste, taste.
3. You have exactly three different items cooking at the same time. And if you don't want to have to clean for hours on end afterwards, you also want to clean up as you go.

I don't have quantities because I don't normally measure (or pay attention to measurements). Probably the reason I suck at baking. Couple of times I hadd all of that going at once AND I decided I wanted meatballs instead of sauce. That was chaotic.

I've made this twice since we've posted. I doubled the recipe both times and froze half of it. The second time I used red wine and crushed tomatoes (instead of canned diced). I didn't notice much of a difference between the red and white wines. I think I'd have to taste them one after the other to determine which was better. I liked the consistency of the sauce better with the crushed tomatoes, however.

Please share, your mother will never find out.

LOL!

We sometimes will ask, just to get the insider scoop on anything..

Canned diced tomatoes will usually suck. It appears they are picked barely red and immediately diced (this applies to Italian imports, domestics from Del Monte, and the store brands), yielding a flavorless, plastic-y batch. I am guessing it's because it's hard to put a nice ripe juicy tomato through a dicer machine.

Stick with canned plum tomatoes - so much better.

Agreed..

How can you dice tomotoes and can them.. and expect the texture from becoming mushy?

Any canned tomato is going to be mushy because they are cooked.

A bit pointless to market a product that's supposed to be fresh and light.. and ends up mushy because of the packaging method..

I hope this causes some traffic. But the thing I hate about the cans of tomatos, or fresh or passata is basically the skin, seeds, pulp etc. Taste of tomato - yes. Seeds, pulp, skins - etc. - no.

So recently I did something terrible. I added tomato soup instead of tinned or fresh tomatos. I'm now making the best bolognese sauces I've ever made. I've been using the soup in some curries as well. This combined with the wonderful braised onions in Ez cans of onions ......

If you think about the work and time that goes into cream of tomato soup .......

Anyway - in the UK - Waitrose own brand is better than Heinz if anyone is interested.