Spaghetti and blanched green beans with vinaigrette

You can make this recipe one of two ways. You can brown the ground meat in a skillet and then add it to the rest of the sauce ingredients as they cook and that way will work great. I prefer the single pot method. It's less to clean up and it yields incredible tasting spaghetti sauce. Your choice.

Bring a pot of heavily salted water to a rolling boil and fill the bottom of a large bowl with ice and then fill with half way with water. We want the water to taste like sea water. We're going to blanch our green beans and then stop the cooking process by plunging them into the bowl of ice water.

We're going to put the green beans in the boiling water but we're not going to cook them until they're soft- we're only going to leave them in the boiling water for about 5 minutes. They should turn a bright green and still have a nice crunch. We'll use tongs to pull them out of the boiling water and put them into the ice water.

We're going to pour some of the hot water into another pot because we'll use it to cook our noodles in a little while.

Make sure all of the water is out of our large pot and then pour a tablespoon of avocado oil and turn the heat to medium high. When the oil begins to shimmer we'll add the onions and give them an occasional stir to make sure they don't burn. After a couple of minutes we'll add the garlic and the mushrooms and stir for another 2-3 minutes and then we're going to move all of these ingredients to the edges of the pot.

Add just a touch of oil to middle, give it just a few seconds to heat and then we're going to add the ground meat to the cleared off area. We'll also add the pepper, the dried herbs and the paprika. We're going to cook the ground meat until there's no pink color left and then we're going to add the wine, the crushed tomatoes, the tomato paste and the whole tomatoes and the fish sauce. We'll add the destemmed fresh herbs and let all of this simmer for a few minutes while we get everything else ready. Taste and adjust salt and pepper.

We'll get our other pot of water boiling if we're cooking pasta or if you're using zoodles you'll skip that step and just saute them at the last minute.

We're going to make the vinaigrette. In a small bowl we're going to whisk together the EVOO, the red wine vinegar, the diced shallots, the diced garlic, the chopped thyme and the dijon mustard. We'll toss the green beans with this prior to putting them on the plates.

If we're boiling the pasta cook per the instructions, if we're sautéing the zoodles, saute them in EVOO or butter until they deepen in color.

Build your plate and top with grated Parmigiano or Pecorino. Enjoy!