Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Bolognese Ain't No Bologna

Since school has been canceled due to inclement snowy and icy weather, I have been doing some cooking. Cooking (and the eating that accompanies the cooking) is one of my favorite activities when I'm at home. My mother told me that the first thing I ever cooked was Sloppy Joe. I have no recollection of this, and I am even a bit skeptical as I do not like eating canned Sloppy Joes. I do remember watching my grandmother make her famous breaded pork chops and helping her with the process of dipping the chops in the eggs and then coating them with breadcrumbs. Brown them and put them in the pot and leave them alone, Gram would say. Before I moved to West Virginia, Sunday dinner at Granny Boots' house was a regular ritual. Though there were not enough forks to go around, fortunately we had enough food to eat.


When I was a neophyte cook and spaghetti maker, I employed the method that I had learned as a kid. I would brown some ground beef, add a jar of sauce that I bought at the store and put that atop the spaghetti. That is it. No onions, no nothin. It was edible, but not quite what I wanted, which was a nice marinara sauce with meatballs. I have not cooked meat sauce for spaghetti in quite some time, but this method never left me entirely.


I was thinking of what I wanted to eat in the near future and Bolognese sauce featured prominently in my daydreams. This is a rich sauce composed of a mirepoix sauted for a bit, ground beef, some white wine, cream (I used milk because I had milk), a can of tomatoes, S and P, and some chicken stock. Usually this sauce has a pork component, but I had no pork on hand. I made the chicken stock earlier in the day from a carcase, S & P, some herbs and more mirepoix, and it was pretty good on its own.


Combined in a dutch oven and left to simmer on the stove for about four hours at exquisitely low heat on my new cooktop, she reduced nicely, leaving a thick and delicious meaty sauce that I mixed with spaghetti. Topped with a little fresh Parmesan cheese and red pepper flakes, and I was eating so well. But I also had a still-fresh loaf of French bread that I bought for quite a discount (47 cents) at the grocery store the day before, so I cut it up, spread some butter, granulated garlic, and green-can cheese mixture on it, and baked it. Bolognese may be my new favorite sauce. Today I'm thinking about chicken pinwheels that I ate for lunch in elementary school in PA. Sounds good to me.


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