again and again

cook it on a saturday night. roam around the house, knowing it’s there in the kitchen, simmering away. cook it in the wintertime, cook it in the spring, cook it on a cool summer’s evening. cook it while aretha franklin sings.

cook it for the first time, from nigel slater’s kitchen diaries, ‘a very good spaghetti bolognese’. cook it again the next week. and again the next week. the second time I made it, I cooked it from memory, without the cookbook there. it's a fairly easy recipe to remember, I guess, it sort of plays it as it lays.
 but as I cooked it again and again, I came to know it in a different way than just knowing the recipe by heart. I came to know when the onions and carrots and celery are soft enough to melt into the sauce, but will still have enough of a presence. the moment to add the tomato passata and the red wine to the minced meat. different each time. and each time made under different circumstances. each time remembering all the other times.

come to call it ‘weekend pasta’. cook it on a sunday night, or on friday, and sometimes on a thursday, when the need for a weekend is especially urgent. eat it in silence, with your eyes closed. eat it with friends, everybody talking all at once. eat it with french bread. eat it while it rains, eat it with a green salad, eat it while making plans.


weekend pasta, adapted from nigel slater’s ‘very good spaghetti bolognese’


nigel also adds some pancetta, but I left it out

heat up some oil in a pan. add a finely diced onion or two, and while that starts getting soft, chop up a carrot and a few stalks of celery, and two cloves of garlic, adding them to the pan as you chop them. add two portabella mushrooms too, cut up in fine or bigger chunks, as you like it. the mushrooms will give the sauce a lovely depth of flavour and juiciness. let the vegetables cook down and get soft for about 10 minutes. then turn up the heat, and add about 400 gr. minced beef, breaking it up with a wooden spoon as it browns. when it's just cooked, add 200 ml. tomato passata and 200 ml. red wine (nigel also adds 200 ml. stock, but I never do. maybe it's because I tend to make this in a rather small pan, and it would lose more moisture, needing the addition of stock, when cooked in a wider pan). add a couple of bay leafs and some freshly grated nutmeg. turn down the heat to the bare minimum, put the lid over so it covers only half the pan, and leave to simmer for about an hour or ninety minutes. stir every once in a while.
when you start putting on on the water for the spaghetti, add a couple of spoonfuls of cream to the sauce, stirring it through. cook the spaghetti and drain it. check the sauce for seasoning (adding tamari instead of salt gives it a deeper flavour). for two people, I add about half of the sauce to the spaghetti. the other half you can put in the fridge for later. when you are cooking for more than two, or simply thus inclined, add more sauce. eat with some parmesan.

- anne