In all honesty, thinking of what to make every day for dinner is becoming very difficult. I’m finding I have less mental energy to prepare what I’d like to make every single day and it’s adding to this burnt out feeling I’ve been having. I’m trying to get over this hump and cooking new dishes and trying out this stack of recipes is helping to motivate me and give me ideas on what to make. It gets a little difficult because Caleb can be picky at times but the world is my oyster and there has to be a mountain of dishes I can try to make.
This weekend I decided to tackle a bolognese sauce. As traditional and iconic as this sauce is, I’ve actually never made it and felt down to the task of trying my hand at it. I looked to BA and of course, Andy Baraghani has a recipe and a video for it. Honestly, I personally don’t enjoy Andy’s personality so I’m not a fan of his recipe videos. I can still appreciate his skill as a cook and trust in his recipes though so I went all-in on the website recipe and skipped around the video before I started just to get a feel for the cooking.
Of course, I tweaked the recipe a little as needed so my meat this time around was half ground beef, and the other half was Italian sausage just because Caleb bought quite a bit of it when quarantine was kicking in and all the other meat was sold out. Since we don’t typically eat much Italian sausage, most of it ended up sitting in the freezer and we still have a ton but I figured this would be my time to use it. Caleb isn’t a huge fan of beef either but he’ll eat it in a meat sauce with all the flavors melding together since he can’t really taste the beef specifically. Perfect time to use both.
So, I browned the meat in the pan, took it out, then added the sofrito type mixture that Andy makes. I decided to skip the pancetta since I already had more going on with the Italian sausage. I think it’s a good substitute for now. My attempts to clear out the freezer will prevail. I added the meat back, and used some canned tomato juice as a substitute for the wine and kept moving on. I don’t have wine here and didn’t want to buy a bottle just for this since we tend not to go through wine at all. Andy mentions the acidity in the wine helping break down the meat so I’m hoping the acidity in the tomato water will work similarly. I added chicken stock (the last of the boxed stock sitting in the fridge!) and let the whole thing cook for 2 hours.
Once that two-hour mark hit I started the pasta. The Italian sausage was still a little tough and I figured it could still go for longer and be great so I let the meat sauce keep cooking and waited a little longer. Once the pasta was 3 mins out, I moved it to the sauce with about 1 cup of pasta water and let it finish cooking. I was a little worried about the sauce not sticking well and being too watery from the pasta water but then I realized I forgot to add the parmesan and once I did that, it thickened up more and hit a better consistency.
All in all, this was a pretty successful run at bolognese (with modifications). Caleb wanted more of a kick to it so the addition of pepper flakes or something along those lines would’ve appeased him a little more. I think it was a little salty for me with all the additions but it was a solid sauce. I’m not sure that I’d do another 3 hours to make something so average but it was a good dish and it wasn’t terribly difficult to make.