Bolognese, my way

I'm not exactly sure why but whenever I've been away from my kitchen for a while, bolognese is the meal I start craving to make.  There's a distinct difference between meals I yearn to eat and meals I yearn to cook, and with bolognese possibly more than any other it's about the rituals.  Possibly because it is the antithesis of cooking on the road; there, by necessity, food is fast - either cooked on a barbecue, campsite kitchen, or on the hob in the van.  Also, bolognese is one of the meals of my childhood - born in 1976, growing up in north-west England the Mediterranean diet hadn't quite swept through our industrial town, but my Mum fully embraced this dish.  She is a wonderful cook, truly my first teacher, but the bolognese I make today is a different entity to the one we used to eat.  

I also like to think this played its part in Andy's and my burgeoning relationship, back when it was still in its infancy - it formed part of the first meal I cooked for Andy in a kitchen of our own, in our lovely flat with parquet floors in Bario Norte, Buenos Aries.

And listen, I know, I know, there are a million and one recipes for bolognese out there.  Everyone I know makes it slightly differently.  Every Italian Mama makes it differently.  This is how I make it, and this works for me -   I just wanted to send it out there.  This is my culinary home, and home can be beautiful place to be.

Bolognese Sauce

The one thing that you can't skimp on with this recipe is time.  It's the perfect recipe for a rainy day, when you have lots of pottering to do.  I also think it's a great recipe for sneaking veggies into vegetable-averse people - the vegetables are about equal to the volume of meat.  And about that meat - I vary between doing 50/50 beef mince to pork mince, and just beef mince.  This time round, beef mince was what I had in the freezer, so beef mince it was.  Final point - I rely quite heavily on my food processor for this, but I'm sure there is nothing that couldn't be done with a knife and a bit more time.

2 tablespoons olive oil
1 onion
1 carrot, peeled
1 stick celery
4 cloves garlic, finely chopped
4 rashers streaky bacon
200g mushrooms
500g best quality beef mince (see note above)
1 glass red wine
1 glass full fat milk
1 can tomatoes
1 tablespoon tomato puree
Beef stock cube
2 bay leaves
2 teaspoons dried oregano
2 teaspoons dried thyme
Pinch of sugar

In a food processor, blitz the onion, carrot and celery until they are in small pieces (think the size of mince).  Heat the olive oil in a large, heavy-based pan over a medium heat, and fry the blitzed vegetables in this. This will take some time until they fully soften; be patient.

Blitz the bacon, then the mushrooms.

Add the garlic to the pan, cook for a few minutes.  Add the bacon and cook until its colour changes and it starts to release its fat.  Add the mushrooms (it will look like loads).  Cook for another 5 minutes or so, until the mushrooms are cooked and some of the water has evaporated from them.

Add the mince and cook until browned.

Add the glass of red wine - stir until most has been absorbed by the other ingredients.
Add the milk and do the same. Do not be freaked out by how horrible it looks right now - the milk acts as a tenderiser for the mince and results in a velvety texture.  I promise, you will not taste it at the end.

Chop the tomatoes in the can (or, if you are impatient like me, get the kitchen scissors in there and chop them that way) and add to the pan along with the tablespoon of tomato puree.

Put the beef stock cube in the tomato can and fill it to the top with hot water.  Add this to the pan.

Add the herbs, sugar, salt and pepper to taste.

Bring to the boil, then reduce to a low simmer - it should bubble and gloop at you occasionally, but nowhere near a rolling boil.  Then LEAVE IT.

Seriously, it needs about 4 hours to become a beautiful bol.

Taste it every so often - it might need upping on the herbs and the s&p.

After about 4 hours it will miraculously come together into the beautiful sauce that we all know and love.

Eat with the pasta of your choice - I'm too much of a realist to be a pasta nazi - I prefer spaghetti whereas Andy prefers penne, but any port in a storm.  It serves, what, about 8? Maybe more, maybe less, all depends.  It freezes beautifully, if you can stop eating it straight from the pan long enough to portion it up.

Chicken and Sweetcorn Meatballs

I was somewhat late to the Ottolenghi table.  I'm not even sure why; I mean, just look how delicious all these sound.  His flavour combinations are right up my street, and I love the sound of his spices.  I hang my head in shame as to how long it took me to get round to making my first recipe.

But, I never can resist a good meatball, so when I read about these little beauties, I had to give them a go.  Even more pressing, I first made them in the run-up to the Rugby World Cup last year, when we would be hosting two very special visitors from home, Andy's Dad, Selwyn, and his good friend and partner-in-crime, Roy.  When I'm cooking for just the two of us most of the time, and for a good chunk of the week just for me if Andy's working in the evening, I can take more of a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants approach; when we had visitors staying with us for close to a month, I needed to get somewhat more organised, and so fell happily on anything I could prepare in the calm before the storm, freeze, and serenely present it to our guests, beatific smile on my face, and act as if I was quite the domestic goddess.  Between you, me and the gatepost, no description could be further from the truth - fine, my baking is ok, but my dusting skills fall sadly short of the mark - so anything to make my life easier is A Good Thing.

These were so lovely I made them again recently.  They are light enough to suit the late summer season (or early autumn, as we are in now - I blame St David, as 1st March is the first day of autumn here).  And, true to expectations, it was the spice element that really makes them zing.  The cumin is a beautiful element of the flavour, and the sweet/sour sauce, from the perfect merging of these ingredients, is good enough to drink by itself, from the bowl.  Although obviously I didn't do that.  OBVIOUSLY. 

A few adaptations from the original - turkey mince is surprisingly hard to find here, so I made the obvious sub of chicken mince, and actually made my own from free-range boneless thighs, I used wholemeal bread instead of the original's white bread, and for the sauce, I used one of those handy jars of marinated, roasted red peppers, instead of roasting my own.  I know, I know, but I already had one in and it seemed the easier route, plus I couldn't tell any difference from the previous time when I did DIY the peppers.

Chicken and Sweetcorn Meatballs with Roasted Red Pepper Sauce
Adapted from Yotam Ottolenghi

For the Meatballs:
100g frozen sweetcorn kernels
3 slices of wholemeal bread, crusts removed
500g boneless chicken thighs, minced
1 free-range egg
4 spring onions, finely chopped
2 tbsp finely chopped parsley
2.5 tsp ground cumin
1.5 tsp salt
0.5 tsp black pepper
1 garlic clove, crushed
Olive oil, for frying

For the Roasted Red Pepper Sauce:
4 roasted red peppers, from a jar
3 tbsp olive oil
1 tsp salt
25g coriander, leaves and stalks
1 garlic clove, peeled
1 small mild chilli, deseeded
2 tbsp sweet chilli sauce
2 tbsp cider vinegar or white wine vinegar

Preheat your oven to 200C.

Put all the ingredients for the sauce in a blender or a food processor, and blitz until smooth.  Taste for seasoning, adjust if necessary, and set aside.

Heat a non-stick frying pan over a medium to high heat, and toast the sweetcorn kernels, tossing occasionally (I love this as I get the chance to practice my cheffy pan-flicky thing, resulting in sweetcorn all over the hob and the floor) until they are well-toasted, and starting to char in some places.  Leave to cool.

Soak the bread in water, squeeze it well to remove the excess liquid, and crumble into a large mixing bowl.  Add all the other meatball ingredients except the oil, and mix well.  Form into meatballs about the size of golf balls.

Heat the oil in your frying pan over a medium to high heat, and, in batches, fry the meatballs until they are brown on all sides.  Transfer to a baking sheet, and cook in your preheated oven - mine took about 10 minutes, it's best to check with one that it's cooked through because of the variables in this - the size of your meatballs, how much you brown them, etc.  Anyway, they don't take long.

Serve with your red pepper sauce on the side.  I like mine with a simply-dressed green salad.

Serves 4

 

A week of eating dangerously

Like most people, as much as I try to vary my diet, there are some definite tried and tested favourites that I return to, time and time again - either through ease, those dishes you can churn out without recourse to cookery book; a wish to make people happy, one of my prime motivators in cooking, I'm the consumate people pleaser and so love doing the meals that Andy counts as his favourite; or just good standby recipes for those days when the supermarket has evaded my to-do list yet again.

My guilty pleasure, though, is cookbooks.  I have, quite literally, hundreds of them - it is a genuine addiction, a growing collection, and in my opinion, once something classes as a collection, it is A Good Thing to add to it.  I have a hobby! I am a well-rounded individual!  One of my favourite mantras about reading is to describe it as 'where time out meets time well spent', and I have no hesitation in adding my cookbook hoard into that part of the Venn diagram entitled How I Spend My Time.  Got to be honest: time spent browsing Go Fug Yourself takes up way too much of the rest of my free time, and can't really be classed as time well spent, so I'm shoehorning cookbooks into the quality time category.

So when I saw a blogging monthly challenge involving random recipe selection, I knew instantly they were on to a winner, and I had to join in, no question.  I'm going to write more details in the next post, as that is the real entry into the challenge, but Andy, my willing accomplice in choosing a random recipe, was so enamoured with the idea that he wanted in, as well.  He turned around while I ran my hands up and down the cookbook towers (surely an earthquake risk in Wellington?), said stop, and then stopped me again as I flicked through the book.

The book he chose was very apt - The Return of the Naked Chef by Jamie Oliver.  This was actually a perfect choice for Andy - because I am so overwhelmingly controlling and bossy in the kitchen, he doesn't get a chance to cook as often as such a talented chef should.  He's used Jamie's recipes in the past, and for the most part, gets on really well with them, so I was super excited when he randomly chose the recipe on page 186, Roasted Fillet of Beef Rolled in Herbs and Porcini and Wrapped in Prosciutto

After a false start with the grocery shopping - we'd run out of dried porcini and couldn't find a replacement in a couple of stores (although I'm guessing Moore Wilsons would have had them), so he subbed a combination of dried shiitake and fresh brown mushrooms - he was off.  And you know what, it was really delicious.  Tasted almost decadent to have something so rich for a midweek dinner, but without being too heavy - it was almost like a lighter, pared-back version of Beef Wellington.  The beef fillet was done to a perfect medium (pinker than it looks in the photo above), and the real wow for me was the fresh herbs - we took them straight from the garden so they were absolutely fresh - the rosemary and thyme really made both the beef and the mushrooms pop with flavour.  If anyone's looking for a last-minute Valentine's dinner, this could be The One.

Adapted from Jamie Oliver

1 packet prosciutto or Parma ham
2 cloves of peeled garlic
1 handful of shiitake mushrooms, soaked in around half a pint of boiling water
1 handful of brown mushrooms
2 good knobs of butter
Juice of half a lemon
sea salt and fresh black pepper
450g fillet of beef, left whole
A good handful of fresh rosemary and thyme, leaves picked and chopped
2 glasses of red wine

Preheat the oven and a small roasting tray that will fit the beef snugly to 230 C.  Lay the prosciutto out so they are all overlapping, leaving no spaces (this was one of the hardest parts; the prosciutto slices stuck together).  Chop a garlic clove and fry in one knob of butter with the mushrooms (drain the shiitake first but keep the water).  Add half the soaking water, simmer on a low heat for about 5 minutes then stir in the lemon juice, the rest of the butter, salt and pepper.
Spread the mushrooms out over half of the prosciutto, keeping a few back for later.  Lay the chopped herbs out on a board, then roll the beef in these herbs so they stick to the outside.  Place this on top of the mushrooms and prosciutto, and slowly roll up the meat in the prosciutto.  Secure with either string or, like us, you can use toothpicks as that was first to hand.
Put the beef in the hot roasting tray with the remaining garlic and cook for 40 minutes for medium (plus or minus 10 minutes for well done or rare).  Half way through the cooking time, add the red wine to the tray.  When it's had its time, remove it to a board and let it rest.  In the meantime, put the tray on the hob, scraping up any bits from the bottom or side so they all go into the gravy. 
We served this with potatoes, which were fantastic for soaking up all the winey juices, and spinach sauteed with the reserved mushrooms. 

Serves 2