Everyone can make a bolognese.

So I've been a bit ill. I don't get ill really. Not properly, visit-the-doctors, spend-days-in-bed ill. I regularly get a bit of a cold or whatever and feel a bit sorry for myself (and moan a lot, and make a lot of soup) but I still do everything I would normally do. I tried that this time, and ended up leaving work half way through a shift and calling in sick for the first time in three years. Ah well. The point of this preamble is not for sympathy, but to discuss food choices. I found myself becoming a child again. I was sitting on a sofa, under the same duvet I had when I was ill as a kid, eating tinned tomato soup. Boiled eggs mashed up in a cup. All it needed was white bread spread with margarine to go with it. Brilliant (yet terrible at the same time).

Now I'm feeling loads better. I've started getting bored at home, want go running, go to the pub. (I probably shouldn't do either of those things quite yet...) But I'm not ready to stop regressing. I've always loved spaghetti bolognese. We had mince most Tuesdays when I was growing up, and whenever I saw it defrosting I would always campaign for spaghetti bolognese. More often than not we'd have mince and tatties, as we had pasta on Mondays.  My mum was against having the same carbs two days in a row. Eventually she gave in to my campaigning with a weary “If you really want spaghetti bolognese, you make it.” As such, this is a recipe I've been honing since I was about twelve.

I'm aware there are lots of much easier ways to make a bolognese – often involving a well known brand of pasta sauce – but I've worked out this recipe throughout the last, erm, fifteen years?  For many of those years I was very skint, so this recipe can also make 1lb of mince feed at least four people.

A note on pasta... I will always call this spaghetti bolognese even though we often don't have spaghetti in the house. I use whatever shape of pasta we've bought in industrial sized bags. This week, penne. Most importantly, if you want your pasta to taste of something make sure you stir it into the bolognese while it's on the heat. You don't want a pile of pasta, then a pile of bolognese. The pasta will be horrible. Bolognese is a sauce and it's supposed to coat the pasta properly.

This is almost certainly not authentic.

My version of Bolognese

Ingredients:

1lb decent steak mince (I think that's probably about 450grammes?)

4 rashers of smoked streaky bacon diced up/or a small pack of lardons

2 onions, finely chopped

a carrot, peeled and finely chopped

2 sticks of celery, finely chopped

6 or so chestnut or button mushrooms, chopped

a red or orange pepper, finely chopped

3 cloves of garlic, finely chopped

a big glass of red wine

a tin of tomatoes

2 tablespoons of tomato puree

a splash of milk (optional, but I think it adds a bit of richness and helps bring it

all together)

1 teaspoon dried oregano

1 teaspoon dried thyme/some fresh thyme

2 dried bay leaves

plenty of salt and pepper

-  First, in a big pan, fry off your bacon/lardons until it's going a bit crispy and tasty. Resist the urge to eat a bit of it out of the pan. (actually eat a bit of it, there's nothing better than fried smoked bacon)

-  Add the onions, carrots, celery and pepper, a big pinch of salt and give it a stir. Now shove a lid on and leave it for five – ten minutes. It should be on a lowish heat, so everything starts to sweat but not colour.

-  Add the mince and garlic, and stir it a bit then let it brown. Stir it occasionally for five minutes until there aren't any pink bits left in the meat.

-  Add the mushrooms and tomato puree, stir, then cook for another five minutes.

-  Add the red wine and turn up a bit to bubble off the alcohol.

-  Add everything else (tomatoes, herbs etc.), give it a good stir, turn it right down and pop the lid on. Now cook it for about an hour, stirring occasionally. 

-  Keep an eye on it – it should reduce and get quite thick. If you think it looks a bit wet, take the lid off for a while. Keep tasting it and checking for seasoning. (if you don't have an hour and a half to make your bolognese you can cook it on a higher heat for less time, it just won't be quite as rich. I'd still give it half an hour of simmering if you can)

-  If you've got four people round for dinner, cook your pasta and drain it, before adding to the pan with the bolognese. If you're freezing some of it, take some of the bolognese out and put it in some tupperware, then stir your pasta into the rest of it. Cook the pasta in the bolognese for thirty seconds – a minute.

There we go! Serve with grated parmesan, salad etc. It probably doesn't need garlic bread, but sometimes it's nice to have a carb overload. 

I promise to do more adventurous food soon. Probably when I've finished the antibiotics and stopped regressing.

In which I follow a recipe and don't write about it, and write two other recipes instead

Happy New Year! Hope you've had a fantastic Christmas/New year. I thoroughly enjoyed my Christmas, which contained lots of food, booze, a backing track of Peppa Pig (thanks to my two year old nephew) and a lot of trips up and down the M62. My Hogmanay was spent on a night shift at work but never mind. We celebrated in the office with cheese and party snacks.

After all the excitement of the festive season, I am now in the process of using up a load of leave. That means some time at home, cooking, cleaning, relaxing, and recovering from all the excesses of the last month. I should probably do some exercise too.

I didn't get as much cooking related stuff for Christmas this year as my tiny kitchen is already full to overflowing. I did get Nigel Slater's book Real Food, so in a rare break from tradition I'm going to follow a recipe. I think Nigel Slater's style of cooking is amazing, and I love his food writing. One of my greatest charity shop finds of last year was a very very old copy of Real Fast Food for about two quid, which I proceeded to read from cover to cover without actually cooking anything from it. Anyway, this time I toyed with the idea of coq au Riesling but decided it was a bit excessive for a Thursday night and made Roast Chicken with Basil and Lemon instead. I'm not one for typing out someone else's recipes – buy his book if you want it. But it was very good! It looked like this: 

So what's the point of this post? Well yesterday I inadvertently opened a tin of cannellini beans when I thought they were chickpeas (middle-class woes). I had to think of something to do with them today, and I thought I'd try out a cannellini bean mash to go with this chicken and a massive pile of green stuff. Plus, when I was writing it, I found a recipe on my hard drive for chicken soup which I'd never posted... so I'm putting it up as a bonus recipe. (Yes, I have random recipes kicking around on my hard drive. What of it? I even had a picture of it on my phone. I know, I should get out more)

Cannellini Bean Mash

Ingredients:

a leek, rinsed and finely chopped

a clove of garlic, finely chopped

a tin of cannellini beans, drained and rinsed

a load of olive oil

a dollop of crème fraiche

salt and pepper

lemon juice (optional – I didn't bother this time because of the lemon-y chicken)

On a medium/low heat fry the leek and garlic in about three tablespoons of olive oil with a pinch of salt. Stir it regularly until it all gets very soft – probably about ten minutes. You don't want it to take on any colour.

Add the cannellini beans and heat through for five – ten minutes.

Add a big dollop of half fat crème fraiche and stir through, then season with some pepper. Start mashing.

Add more extra virgin olive oil to get the consistency you want. Because of the leek it won't go completely smooth anyway, I added another three or four tablespoons. Taste it, and add more salt and pepper if required. Serve with whatever you like.

I really enjoyed this as an alternative to potatoes. We've had a LOT of potatoes over the last few weeks... 

Now the bonus recipe:

Chicken soup

This is my rough recipe for chicken soup which I made up after three days of coughing, sneezing and generally being very dopey. It's not authentic Jewish-penicillin-chicken-soup, not least because I'm not Jewish. Maybe lapsed Catholic penicillin?

It's in two stages - first the stock then the soup itself. This probably made enough for three/four portions? You can add whatever veg you have to hand.

Ingredients:

one chicken carcass (or some chicken pieces, three to four bits? wings/drumsticks or whatever)

an onion, peeled and quartered

two carrots, one roughly chopped and one peeled and finely chopped

a leek, take the top leafy bit off and roughly chop then rinse it, finely chop and rinse the rest

3 or 4 garlic cloves, peeled and smashed a wee bit

a quarter of a head of celery, take the spindly middle bits out and roughly chop, then finely chop a couple of substantial sticks of celery

a couple of big handfuls of pearly barley, rinsed (could use a couple of peeled, diced potatoes or some pasta. Some sort of starch anyway)

about a centimetre of ginger, roughly chopped into chunks

seasoning - a sprig or two of thyme, two or three bay leaves, 6/7 peppercorns, two cloves and a good pinch of sea salt

For the stock put all the reject bits of the vegetables (onion, roughly chopped carrot, leafy bit of leek, the garlic, spindly bits of celery and the ginger) and the chicken carcass in a pan with a lid, along with the all the seasoning. Cover with cold water, then bring up to the boil. Skim away any scum, turn the heat right down, cover it and leave it to simmer for about two hours.

When it's done, pour the stock through a sieve and put it back in the pan. Add the pearl barley and bring it back up to the boil before turning it down and simmering for twenty minutes. Then add all the other vegetables – ie. The nicely chopped stuff. Now simmer until everything's cooked. If you did chicken pieces in the stock you can pull off the meat and add it to the soup too.

Then it's done. Eat whilst under a duvet, then go back to bed.