“You Cook – I Eat” Part 1 – Spaghetti Bolognese al Forno

“You cook – I eat” is a long standing agreement between me and Yuri, and it goes back to the beginning days of him moving in with me. From the very beginning, I had been pestering him with asking him to help me find out what the heck it is that I want to cook during the weekend, and what kind of things he wouldn’t mind having during the week, so that I could do the shopping accordingly. The answer was always “I don’t know” or “I don’t care,” and it frustrated me endlessly after a few weeks, which is when he came up with the term. This basically frees him up from the responsibility of helping me find out what the heck I should be making – as he’s fine with anything, because I’ll make it so well anyways. He also knew that I wasn’t going to go shop for the things he utterly despises just to spite him, because the mother in me always wants to make sure that everyone around me is well fed.

When I say “you cook – I eat” nowadays, I usually refer to the things that he loves the most from my recipes, and this one’s a prime example for that. There are of course others, and some of them are actually waiting to be posted – I promise I’ll get to it someday.

My love for spaghetti Bolognese comes from when I was a little child. I already mentioned that it went under the name of “cat stew” in my family, which is a reference of the silly stereotypes that Italians eat cat meat. It is not a generally well known stereotype and as such, the term did cause some funny moments in my family’s history. One day my aunt was taking my cousin home from school and they got onto the super busy underground. My cousin had this really low and loud voice for a child, so when he turned to my aunt and asked “Mom, when are you making cat stew for dinner again?” the entire car heard it. Needless to say, my aunt got approximately 300 killer looks, and people swiftly moved away from near them. So there she stood with a 6 year old child in the middle of the car with nobody around her in a 2 metre radius, all because of the silly cat stew. I think that’s pretty funny. :p

I am not going to give tons of details of how my mom makes spaghetti, but let it be said that she actually never buys ground beef for it – nor does she grind the meat at all. She will spend about half an hour cutting the beef into miniscule cubes and only then can the cooking begin. When I was a kid, I used to eat Bolognese with ketchup on top (I am really ashamed of this now) and I didn’t know better until I was 16 and went to Canada. The lady I stayed with in Canada decided to make Bolognese one day, and when I asked for ketchup to go with it, she downright refused and said that ketchup probably ruins the entire taste, and insisted that I try without. And how right she was!! I’d like to mention at this point that my father still puts ketchup on his spaghetti, and every time I am there to witness it, I argue with him about it. But oh well, old habits die hard. :)

I think the key to a good Bolognese is to not be afraid of investing time into cooking it long enough. It usually takes me 3-4 hours to be done, and I really don’t regret that I’m taking my time. Over the course of years, I have changed many things in the original recipe that I took from my mom (i.e. I try to completely avoid ketchup when making the sauce, and have also significantly reduced the amount of spices and salt that I used up until a couple of years ago) and I think it has evolved into something really exquisite by now.

I also use mushrooms (although standard Bolognese doesn’t have that) and fresh herbs, especially since I moved to Switzerland. Having said that, I have also found it reasonably difficult to find good enough meat here for Bolognese. The ground beef that you buy at the store has a horrible after-taste, which just won’t go away with cooking, and until recently, I just simply couldn’t find meat that was the quality that I needed. It was either not juicy enough (the Swiss like to remove every single trace of fat from the meat, which is normally great, but not when you’re trying to make something that needs not totally lean meat.) I buy the meat for the sauce in either slices or as a single piece nowadays, luckily I managed to find an acceptable quality after all these months of being here.

So without further ado, here’s the recipe and the ingredients – this does serve 6-8 people, depending how hungry they are:

• A few slices of bacon (cut into small pieces)
  
• 2 big onions (finely chopped)
  
• 4-6 cloves of garlic depending on the size of the clove (crushed)
  
• 1 kilo of ground beef
  
• 500g mushrooms (thinly sliced)
  
• 2 carrots (grated)
  
• 1 turnip (grated) (If you have no access to turnip, you can use half a celery)
• 500 ml tomato puree
  
• Fresh marjoram, rosemary, thyme, oregano and basil (finely chopped)
  
• Salt, sugar (to taste)
  
• Spaghetti
  
• Tons of cheese (grated)

In a large pan, sautée the bacon until golden brown. Add the onions to it and crush the garlic on top of the bacon-onion mixture. Stir carefully and add the marjoram, the rosemary and the oregano. Stir for another half a minute, turn the stove on to high temperature and add the meat. This is when you start stirring like crazy and stabbing the meat (that just gave me a very bad mental image :)) to make sure that it mixes well with the onion-herb mix and that it actually falls into crumbs rather than stick together in a huge patty. Once the meat has browned and is crumby enough, stir the mushrooms into the mix, put the lid onto the pan and leave them there for about 5 minutes.

After about 5 minutes, the mushrooms will have released enough juices and reduced in size to be ready for the tomato puree. Pour the puree into the pan (obviously after removing the lid, no Dutch jokes today :p) and stir everything well together. At this point, you can do a preliminary taste check and add salt and sugar, however, since carrots and turnip will be added to the mix, they’re going to significantly change the taste of the dish.

Add the carrots and the turnip, and if you think the sauce is too thick, add some water. Now is the time to leave the kitchen and do something else for the next two hours. Of course, you can check on the sauce every once in a while (I’m an obsessive compulsive taster, I have to taste the food every half an hour to check whether anything else needs to be added.) After about 2 hours, you can be sure that even the grated turnip is soft, moreover completely disappeared in the sauce, you can now add the thyme and the basil, alongside the salt and sugar, if necessary.

In the meantime, cook the spaghetti (al dente, otherwise it’s going to turn into a big mushy mess while being baked.) – and make sure you keep to the basic rules, fools (as Mr. T would say) – do not put oil into the cooking water, and for god’s sakes don’t rinse them in cold water when done aaaaahhhhhhhhhh!!! When the spaghetti is done, get a decently sized porcelain/glass baking dish (I have no idea what these are called in English, I don’t even know what they’re called in Hungarian.) and put a layer of noodles onto the bottom. Add a layer of the sauce on top (I usually make sure that it’s evenly spread all across the spaghetti, and then I mix the pasta with the sauce.) – continue until you run out of pasta.

Put the bazillion tons of cheese onto the top (I usually use standard mozzarella, or gratin mix) and put it into the oven at 250 degrees for about 10 minutes, which is when the cheese turns golden brown and crunchy on top, and you’re good to go!

Needless to say, serving can be quite tricky, I usually end up happy if I only mess up the first plate. :)