Yesterday’s dinner prep was for spaghetti bolognese: the meat-based sauce that originated in Bologna, Italy. We opted to undertake Heston Blumenthal’s version and dedicated 8 blessed hours to the endeavour. Was it worth the effort? Yep. Delicious!

The recipe is involved and requires preparing the meat ragu (pork shoulder and beef shank) with a soffritto and the tomato sauce separately. These sit on the stove simmering away for hours before being combined for the last two hours of cooking. We varied the recipe some by adding beef shank (rather than oxtail), red wine (rather than white), omitting the sherry vinegar and including a more traditional bouquet garni of Italian herbs (oregano, parsley). This recipe had a lot of bouquet garnis in it!

Then let these two sauces sit and simmer away, stirring occasionally.

(return 4 hours later)

G prepared his always-good bruschetta as an appetizer and I made up a tiny batch of vodka leek potato teasers (potato, leek, basil vodka, basil vodka chicken stock) to start us off.

This was followed by a
superb salad of baby greens and halved olives served with a plum tomato,
garlic and basil vodka dressing. I quickly deep-fried the tomato
skins as an additional garish. It was fabulous.

Make or buy some good Italian pasta and cook. Then using chopsticks ‘twirl’ the pasta into logs and plate. Top with the sauce and a generous amount of parmesan and enjoy!