Sunday, October 22, 2006

Bologn-azy

I was inspired by my dear friend and his gurgling, eyes rolled back, rhapsodizing over his wife's meat sauce to try my hand as well. If I lived in Texas I would have invited myself over for a sampling, but since I live miles away (into the hundreds) I was forced to try my hand at it all solo. I opted to make Bolognese sauce. Mostly because I like to say it and partly because it sounded greasy and unctuous and I like that.

Anyway since this was a last minute study evading/forcing (3 hour simmer time) tool I merely did a cursory search on the internet for a recipe. Normally I would have been at the library with 5 cookbooks fstacked in front of me so this was really a step toward a new more laid back me. Back to the topic... Debate a plenty cos it's got milk and wine that gets reduced as some point in the recipe and maybe has a little tomato as well. I settled on the wine reducing after cooking meat before tomato sauce and finishing with the milk. Mostly I did this because of the wikipedia entry and partly because I'm an idiot and reference wikipedia much more often than I should. (thanks to alreadythere for gently pointing this out to me over a pina colada) The food turned out kind of eh.

That may have been because in my research I found a paraphrased Marcella Hazan recipe (lady knows her stuff) and she reduces the milk very early on. I suspected that perhaps this was because the enzymes in the milk helped to soften the meat in the dish, but I got misled by a my grandmother made it this way entry. This morning I went to work to find people reiterating my initial thoughts about the milk. Then I thought. My mother is a great cook (really, and not just in the subjective sense - well, i suppose it's all subjective but maybe you know what i mean) and I have been to plenty of homes where mamas cooking is doughy pancakes or condensed milk marshmallow fluff jello blobs (a horrendous experience). I feel that this is perhaps something that does not improve with age. So I got misled and added the milk too late. This probably affected the texture. Plus I used pork and beef and I definitely felt it could have benefitted from a little veal. Regardless I will be eating this for the next week (or longer).