Bolognese

As I've mentioned before, my youngest daughter is a big fan of noodles. This is her favourite sauce to top them with. I've tried other sauces, but as far as she's concerned this is the only one worthy of eating (with the exception of the occasional pesto, and every now and then just straight butter and parm).

The original version of this recipe was in a Cooks Illustrated magazine which I have since misplaced. I recall skipping a few steps in the original, and I think it's evolved along the way (like that game you play in grade school when all the kids sit in a circle and a message starts with a whisper to a neighbour at one end and is completely different by the time it travels around the circle). In any event the main features are there, and it still tastes great.

This recipe doesn't use much in the way of fresh produce, so it's ideal for the 10 months of the year when tomatoes are, well, not that great. It starts with a carrot and an onion (a small onion, or half a big one).

Chop the carrot and onion nice and fine. You can do this in a food processor if you're in a hurry, but I find that cleaning the dumb thing takes just as long as chopping with a knife anyway.

Heat a chunk of butter and some olive oil in a deep frying pan (you need straight sides to hold all the sauce).

Then add your carrot and onion and fry up the battuto/sofrito/mirepoix on medium until the vegetables are nice and soft. I also add some dried oregano at this point so that the oil can pick up the oregano flavour.

Next step is to add a pound of ground pork. This works with beef too, but I think the original bolognese is supposed to have pork in it, so I go for that.

Chop the pork into two inch cubes while stirring it with the carrots and onion. Add some salt at this point, and let the meat fry for a minute or two.

Then the key to this whole recipe. Milk. This is the trick to making a meat sauce that doesn't seem like a bunch of hard little erasers mixed with tomato sauce. The milk keeps the meat protiens from tightening up too much, and yields a nice smooth and tender sauce.

Just pour two cups of milk into the meat and carrot mixture. The next phase of the recipe involves boiling the milk down so that just the fat remains (mmmm...). This takes about half an hour. I put the heat up one notch from medium to help it along.

During that half hour, you just stir the mixture now and then and gradually break-up the meat into smaller pieces with the spatula.

About 30 minutes later, the milk is gone. There should be just a bit of liquid left in the pan for the next step.

Now it's time to add the tomato sauce. Here's the alternative to fresh tomatoes and home-preserves: a big can of tomato sauce (680 ml size), and a wee can of tomato paste.

The first thing to go in is the tomato paste (all of it). Use the reamining liquid in the pan to help mix it in evenly.

Then pour in the tomato sauce (all of it too). Now you can turn the heat down to below medium, since the goal here is just to heat the sauce through. It can spend 10 to 30 minutes on the stove now, depending on how soon you want to eat, how thick you like your sauce, and how much you like cleaning tomato splatters off your stove.

And that's it -- only and hour start to finish. Top it off with some freshly grated parm and some salt and pepper. This makes enough sauce for about 8 plates of pasta, so you should be able to get two meals out of it. It freezes well, so I put half of it aside for a quick meal on another day. Buon appetito!