“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. :)

Fabulous Faux Beefsteak Budapest Style

So I was talking to Kenny the other day and he asked me what I was going to make for dinner – and I visioned these little chicken skewers, with a salad on the side, and some potatoes (which then lead to an argument of course, because he said I should make a gratin, but meh… I don’t like gratin that much.)

Then, the next thing I know is that it’s 7.30 PM again, and I am still caught up in Excel-hell and by the time I’d get out, the stores will have closed. This would have been okay, except I missed one ingredient to the chicken skewers, and that was the chicken.

So I packed up and ran to the baby-Coop around the corner (I call it baby because of its size and because it’s obviously a convenience store, rather than a standard grocery store.) And… they had no chicken. They had turkey, which is something that I stopped eating since about a year ago, when a vein hidden inside a slice of turkey breast started spraying blood all over my plate. It was a rather enlightening experience that taught me well – either don’t look at your plate when you eat turkey, or don’t eat turkey. So, obviously the skewers were crossed off the list, but I still had the other ingredients that I desperately wanted to use – mushrooms, onions, bacon, etc. so I had to think of a different solution, and a different type of meat.

They had pork chop steaks à la minuit (which means they’re sliced so thin that you can see through them) – and the same with beef, but then I saw that they had nice rump steaks available. Yuri loves steak, and I remembered that I still had some leftover peas in the fridge (our freezer is currently in such a catastrophic state that I prefer not to put anything in it.. not like it would fit in due to the amount of ice that had already cumulated in it.) And then it dawned on me… Budapest style, baby, all the way!

Well, fake Budapest style, really. For those of you who don’t know, the original recipe takes a nice juicy tenderloin steak, and puts a “Hungarian Lecsó” based stew on top of it. It will contain bacon, onions, peppers, tomatoes (that’s what lecsó is) – and on top of that you’ll have mushrooms, peas and goose liver. So the food I cooked was faux for several reasons:

1. I had insufficient amount of peppers at home and they take too long to cook (for my taste anyway) so I skipped them
   
2. No goose liver (apologies, foie gras!) – I’m also not a huge fan, and Yuri gags by the thought of liver, not to mention by the smell of it.
   
3. I used rump steak and not tenderloin
   
4. The side dish was not French fries

I think it’s a real culinary experience to go and try Beefsteak Budapest style in Budapest restaurants, because you can be almost certain that you will not get what you’re supposed to. For one, people are too cheap to use tenderloin for it, they just sell whatever else they can find that can be sold as tenderloin, and secondly, you have a 99% probability that you’ll get chicken liver instead of foie gras. Because the two are totally comparable, am I right? :) I love it when the staff thinks that you’re too stupid to notice the rather obvious difference between the two.

However, there are the rare occasions when you do get what you paid for. I had my best Budapest steak in a restaurant quite a few years ago. It was quite a classy place, which since then has unfortunately closed, and work took me there for a business dinner. I remember that I was very surprised when I bit into the liver and realised that they didn’t try to screw me over for once. I also remember that my boss (his nationality and other characteristics concealed, of course) ate off the clients’ plates (he’d either try a bite of their starter, or finish whatever they couldn’t eat anymore.) The rest of us (including the clients) were sitting and staring with our jaws dropped, it was unbelievable.

He made another interesting choice that evening – he ordered ketchup to his steak. I could see the look of sheer disgust on the waiter’s face as he carried out the order, and needless to say, I was quite surprised myself that something like that could happen. :p It kind of reminded me of the story a friend of mine told when a girlfriend of his ordered ketchup in a French restaurant alongside her duck breast, and the waiter told her to go to the fish and chips shop around the corner if she wants to humiliate her dinner like that. :)

But anyway, back to the matter at hand. I quickly chopped up the mushrooms and the onions, sliced the bacon and shortly thereafter, pretty much everything was in the pan. I was contemplating whether I should put any spices in the mix (like marjoram,) but a simple salt + black pepper combo did the job. I added the peas and I was happy happy joy joy that I was soon to be finished, but then I looked to my right and noticed the two kilos of ripe tomatoes that I had bought earlier on in the week for tomato sauce to be made, and said to myself, ahhh, what the hell, I’ll just do it. I peeled 3 tomatoes quickly (yes, this does mean that I didn’t put them into boiling water for 3 minutes to save myself some time, you convenient people,) chopped them, and off they were to faux-sauce land! I guess this explains why the tomatoes are nowhere to be seen in the picture showing the ingredients, but hey.. what can I say. It so happens that I improvise from time to time, and by the time it came to that, I couldn’t restore the rest of the ingredients in raw form just to take a picture with the tomatoes. Tough luck!

Here are the ingredients:

• 2 slices of rump steak
• 200 g mushrooms
• 200 g peas
• 50 g bacon
• 2 mid-sized onions
• 3 mid-sized tomatoes
• 8 small carrots
• 4 small potatoes
• salt, ground black pepper, oil, rosemary
  

As a bonus, here are some pictures of the stew (or ragout, if you like) being made. Mind the artisan skilled photography!

I just realised that I made absolutely no mention of the side dish, I only explained what all it was not going to be. I chose roast potatoes (Amandines are the best for this in my opinion) and roast carrots. Once again, easy method – peel carrots, wash potatoes (oh my God, do not ever peel Amandines – not ever!!) chop chop, into the pan, oil + a bit of water + salt (and in my case fresh rosemary) on top, into the oven at 235 degrees, shut the oven door and you can forget about them for the next 30 minutes, which is when you open the oven door, take the pan out and cheer, because your side dish is ready to serve. :)

So basically, with my stew ready and the potatoes / carrots in the oven, all I had to do was to grill the steaks. Yuri likes his medium (or medium-rare, but I’m sure he’s going to correct me if the latter is not true) and I like mine close to well done, but not well done enough for the meat to lose its juiciness. Well, I would like to report that I actually did a perfect job on Yuri’s steak, it was just the way he liked it (he told me at the end that it was a bit tough, but that also could have been because the meat wasn’t perfect in the first place and because he usually eats pretty slowly, so towards the end, the meat was totally cold.) – and as far as mine is concerned, since I was so busy taking pictures of the result on Yuri’s plate, that the steaks entered the super well done category. It was still okay though, I’ll just make sure to not burn it next time.

Here is the end result (eventually, the triangle-shaped plate will be boring, then I’ll buy some new ones :p) – I think it turned out to be much nicer than I had originally thought.

On a side note – it seems this week is beef week in my house – I have approximately a kilo and a half of beef waiting for me to process it one way or another. This should be interesting… :)