Believe it or not, deep down inside, I have a little bit of hippy in me.  So last night I decided to do some recycling.  There was quite a bit of meat on the half-leg of lamb I roasted Sunday evening, so I decided to recycle it into a ragu.  I began by making some peppercorn pappardelle.  I'll probably do a "how to" on fresh pasta sometime soon, because it's so easy and delicious . . . yet few of my friends make their own.  So as not to spoil the forthcoming "how to," I'll just give the basics here: two cups of unbleached all purpose flour, 3 eggs and some freshly, coarsely ground pepper.

While the pasta dough was resting, I threw together a ragu by sautéing an onion, a red bell pepper, and a celery stalk in some olive oil with some oregano, basil and red pepper flakes.  Next I threw in 3 cloves of minced garlic and cooked it about a minute, until it became fragrant.  I then added 2 tablespoons of tomato paste and a 28 oz. can of whole, peeled tomatoes that I had crushed in their can by hand before adding them, juice and all, to the other ingredients.  I also added a teaspoon of sugar and a splash from the bottle of Ruffino Il Leo Chianti Superiore 2006 ($11) I had opened and decanted.  Ruffino is a vineyard/winery in Tuscany that produces some great, reasonably priced wines.  Finally, I added about a pound of leftover lamb, cut into bite-sized pieces.

While the ragu was reducing, I put a large pot of salted water on the stove to boil, rolled out the pasta, and cut the pappardelle by hand (because I don't have a pappardelle-cutting attachment for my pasta machine).  I cooked the pappardelle for about two minutes and then plated it up with the ragu salted to taste, some sliced olives, chopped parsley and grated pecorino romano.  This hippy recycling stuff isn't so bad, after all!