Ma-Ma's Pasta "Milanese" (FM)

• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 onion, chopped
• 1 green bell pepper, chopped
• 2 celery stalks, chopped
• Salt and black pepper
• 2 tablespoons minced garlic
• Two 3.75-ounce cans sardines, preferably packed in olive oil
• 1/4 cup tomato paste
• 1 cup red wine or water, or more as needed [What did I use?  Oh yeah, oxidized Malbec that I opened at least a week and a half before for the escabeche.]
• One 28- or 35-ounce can chopped or whole tomatoes; include their juice
• 1 small cauliflower, cored and roughly chopped [I preferred to cut them into florets.]
• 1/2 cup raisins or currants [The currants I had for this blog's very first entry over a year ago had expired.  Raisins are a food-stuff that should be ubiquitous I guess in a kitchen but still somehow lack, like ketchup.  In any case, I wound up using blueberries.  Yes, they are a dried berry; nope, they don't really serve the right function.]
• 1/2 cup chopped pecans or walnuts
• 8 ounces any pasta, preferably whole wheat [Hahaha.  I rarely cook recipes involving pasta.  I'm not going to waste my time with edible cardboard.]

Mise en place.

Cook onion, bell pepper, and celery until everything is soft and the onion becomes translucent.

Stir in garlic, sardines with their ooil, and tomato paste until mixture is fragrant and starts to stick to the bottom.

Stir in wine and scrape up bits from bottom of pan.  Add tomatoes and cauliflower and cook until cauliflower is extremely tender.

Stir in fruit and nuts.

The dish was pretty awesome.  I might do it again since it was quite good, but who knows.
I apologize for the fact that I can't be any more detailed about my reaction to the dish since I'm pretty slow at blogging now, but I totally dug the combination of garlic, sardines, tomatoes, and celery.  Maybe I'll even have the proper dried fruit for next time.

I should cook more pasta dishes.