A good example of typical 5g cookery. This is how I make bolognese; you may like to compare this to Mark's recipe for bolognese. Serves four hungry geeks.
- Put a large pan of water on one hob for the pasta. Put the other pan (what? you have more than two?) on the other hob, turn it up to full, and add a little olive oil (not a lot — the intention here is not to deep-fry the beef, but merely to stop it sticking).
- Add 1kg of lean minced beef to the pan. Chop three large onions into small dice and add to the pan. Crush three cloves of garlic into the pan. Add a third of a jar each of oregano and basil, lots of freshly-ground black pepper, and two beef stock cubes; mix well, and cook (stirring occasionally) until the mince is no longer visibly pink.
- Add three tins of (cheap) tinned tomatoes, and a decent squeeze of tomato puree. Stir well, turn the heat down to halfway, and cook for another ten minutes or so.
- By this time the water should be boiling, so add half a teaspoon of salt and as much pasta as you want (a pint per person seems about right for hungry geeks). Cook the pasta (and bolognese) for 12 minutes, drain, and serve with grated cheddar cheese.
Variations on the above:
- Add crushed chilli along with the herbs for Evil Bolognese.
- Add green chilli peppers and crushed chilli at the start, and kidney beans along with the tomato, and you've got chilli con carne. I like cumin seeds and copious amounts of paprika as well, but this is a matter of taste. (Recent experimentation has shown that cooking the onions, chillies and kidney beans for a bit before adding the beef works rather well, in that the kidney beans take on the flavour of everything else. I'll probably be doing it this way in future.)
- Add a third of a bottle of red wine along with the tomato. (We do this most of the time, since we normally have a bottle or two of extremely cheap red wine in the cupboard, and it does make it taste even better.)
- Add finely-chopped bacon at the same time as the beef.
- Add worcestershire sauce. (It really doesn't need it; you can always add it to taste when you serve it, if you like that sort of thing.)
- Bizarre variation that worked quite well: use less onion, garlic and tomato, add soy sauce and ground ginger, and serve with noodles instead of pasta. It's not really bolognese any more, but what the hell. (We did this mostly by accident when we only had one onion left and no pasta.)
Uses for this: