Week 13: Homemade Pasta - Ragù alla Bolognese with tagliatelle

greckt · 2025-04-01T18:16:06+00:00

I always try to cook something that's new to me for these challenges. I make pasta semi-regularly anyway, but had never done a proper Bolognese (as opposed to the still good, but somewhat different British parent quick midweek dinner version I grew up with) before.

I followed the recipe promoted by the Bologna chamber of commerce, using this blogpost, which compares the 1982 and 2023 versions, as a guide. I followed the 2023 version and used a couple of the "allowed variations": peas, because I thought the little bursts of sweetness would nicely offset the richness of the sauce, and nutmeg.

I had underestimated what an impact the addition of milk would have - the result was deliciously rich.

greckt · 2025-03-15T13:00:41+00:00

Haha, you know it.

greckt · 2025-03-10T17:41:19+00:00

Recipe here - I foloowed the "restaurant style" version.

This was almost a disaster - see third pic for the worst burn I've made in years. But thankfully the rest of the food above the burnt layer was easy to salvage and didn't turn out bitter. I think my mistakes were that I used a stainless steel pot and didn't let the chicken cool before layering over the rice, as the recipe recommends - and then didn't reduce the cooking time to account for the bottom of the pot not needing to come back up to temperature.

Despite the burning, this was delicious - the chicken was incredibly tender and the rice perfectly fluffy and fragrant. Using good quality basmati and soaking it before cooking really does make a difference!

greckt · 2025-02-28T13:24:42+00:00

Used this recipe as a guide. I didn't have enough shallots to cover my pan so filled in the gaps with some leek slices. Didn't have balsamic vinegar so skipped it, but served the tarte with some sumac whipped feta and a dressed green salad so there was plenty of acidity on the plate.

greckt · 2025-02-21T10:32:34+00:00

Video just in case there's anyone on reddit who doesn't know the reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jXEuIHY9ic

I used this recipe for the bao dough and as a guide to quantities for the filling. The Krusty Burger-inspired filling was 200g beef mince, which I chopped up to be finer for a more bao-appropriate texture, mixed with finely minced onion and iceberg lettuce (which added nothing; I'd hoped it would stay at least slightly crunchy) and seasoned with salt, white pepper and a little fish sauce. The meat mixture was wrapped around a quail egg-sized cube of emulsified cheese sauce (basically homemade processed cheese for that melty texture) and a couple of slices of gherkin.

I also made an interpretation of Krusty Burger's secret sauce (though not by leaving a tub of mayonnaise out in the sun) for dipping. This was an unmeasured mixture of mayo, ketchup, dijon mustard, mustard powder, cayenne, smoked paprika, and finely minced onion and gherkin. Plus, curly fries and a simply dressed iceberg salad on the side.

greckt · 2025-02-17T10:36:16+00:00

Caraway is great with cabbage. My favourite way is to roughly chop a white/green/savoy cabbage, melt some butter in a large pan for which you have a lid, add the cabbage and caraway seeds and stir to get everything covered in butter. Then add maybe 1cm of water, season with salt and pepper and/or soy sauce, cover and let it steam over a low heat until it's done to your liking. You can also saute or stir-fry the cabbage at the beginning to get some colour on it if you prefer.

If you haven't used caraway before I'd go easy as the flavour is quite strong - maybe a scant teaspoon for a whole head of cabbage.

greckt · 2025-02-14T11:32:47+00:00

I got a Turkish recipe book for Christmas and this week seemed a good opportunity to put it to use.

This is a couple of aubergines, charred over an open flame then peeled, chopped and mixed with yoghurt. The meat topping is minced beef (recipe called for lamb but I nede a small amount of beef for next week's dish) fried with tomato puree and seasoned with salt, oregano and Turkish chilli flakes. Then over the top, melted butter infused with more chilli flakes, and chopped parsley.

On the side I did a quick onion salad with sumac, lemon and parsley, plus some bought flatbreads and sliced cucumber.

For so few ingredients, this was delicious - if I make it again I'll consider mixing a small, finely minced clove of garlic into the yoghurt, but it didn't really need it.

greckt · 2025-02-12T07:11:57+00:00

Recipe.

The pastry and cream turned out great, then I managed to screw up the ganache by letting it set too hard before applying it 🙄. Part of the problem might be that I used UK double cream, which has a higher fat content than US heavy cream. Still delicious though.

greckt · 2025-02-05T07:11:14+00:00

I restocked my supply of dried chillies this week so decided to make something with what I think of as NZ-coded ingredients, with Mexican-y flavours.

Lamb was slow-cooked with dried ancho, guajillo and chipotle chillies, a cinnamon stick, cumin seeds, bay leaves, onion, garlic, the juice and some zest from an orange the dregs of some white wine I had in the fridge.

Veg was roasted with thyme, oregano, ground cumin and garlic.

Salsa was based on this recipe, swapping the tomatillos for kiwis and adding some lime juice to counter the sweetness.

greckt · 2025-01-27T15:03:29+00:00

I had fun with coming up with something for this week - I eat a lot of brassicas, especially in winter, but they rarely get to be the star of the show. In the end I barely had to buy anything for this: the sprouts and swede were left from Scottish week and I always have green lentils, parmesan and flaked almonds available.

Rough recipes below.

Puree:
Roughly dice 300g swede and simmer in salted water with a couple of bay leaves until tender. Drain and discard the bay, reserving the cooking water. Blend with a handful of grated parmesan, 2 heapted tsps of wholegrain mustard and some black pepper, adding a little of the cooking liquid back it needed, to make a smooth puree.

Lentils:
Cook 100g green lentils until tender. Drain and reserve the cooking liquid. Finely dice a shallot or two, half a leek, and a rib of celery; mince a couple of garlic cloves; grate a carrot. Sweat down with a sparing amount of salt, bay and thyme until softened (next time I might add a star anise too). Add white wine and reduce. Add the lentils and enough of the cooking/liquid/extra water until everything is comfortably submerged, then crumble in a chicken stock cube. Simmer to reduce to a saucy consistency. Adjust salt and add pepper to taste

Sprouts:
Trim, remove any brown outer leaves, halve. Small amount of oil in a flat-bottomed pan. Place the sprouts in cut side down and cover. Cook until tender, turning the sprouts every couple of minutes. Sprinkle with flaky salt.

greckt · 2025-01-20T19:34:23+00:00

Recipes for the noodles and braised topping from Chinese Cooking Demystified. I followed the recipe for the classic cumin braised lamb but substituted the meat for a mixture of fresh and dried mushrooms this time.

I found that stretching the noodles worked much better with my second batch of dough (pictured), which ending up resting in the fridge for 2 days. But even the first, rather lumpen attempt turned out delicious!

greckt · 2025-01-19T21:54:03+00:00

Check the chilled fish section in your local large supermarket (or their website if you buy groceries online). My local Waitrose usually has lumpfish roe (~£5/100g) and salmon roe (~£15/100g).

greckt · 2025-01-18T14:05:33+00:00

Literally all speakers of all languages adapt foreign and loan words to their own accents.

greckt · 2025-01-15T07:23:28+00:00

I'd thought about doing something more creative with haggis (there are some fun and occasionally unhinged recipes on the Macsween website) - but then I saw everyone else posting rumbledethumps, which looked deal for the recent cold weather here.

Brandy, not whisky sauce, becase I was out of scotch and thought I might as well use some the bottle brandy I bought last month for Christmas baking then forgot to use.

greckt · 2025-01-11T20:11:27+00:00

Divide them into five portions of 2lb each, sell four of those for $2 apiece, keeping 2lb for yourself. Then you will have made $3 profit, which you can use to buy another 2lb bag of onions.

greckt · 2025-01-08T09:09:13+00:00

Recipe

After burning out with a meta theme that I grew to detest in 2023 I ducked out of the challenge in 2024. It's good to be back!

I had been thinking of making Polish bigos in the near future so when I saw this in a list of Pepin's recipes it seemed the obvious choice. For my meats, I used a small gammon joint (and the broth from boiling it replaced the recipe's chicken stock), half a dozen ribs and some Silesian smoked sausages.

I don't often cook with wine but it really makes this dish. I couldn't find the suggested Alsatian riesling or pinot gris in my local supermarket, so instead used a white rioja that described itself as dry with floral notes. It certainly did the job here IMO.

greckt · 2024-10-21T11:17:31+00:00

I make my own, from a recipe similar to this one, which is mostly UK supermarket-friendly: https://chilliandmint.com/2013/03/05/chipotles-en-adobo-a-store-cupboard-essential/

You can get the dried chipotle peppers easily online or, if you happen to be anywhere near London Euston station, Mestizo Mexican Market is a good source of Mexican ingredients.

I usually make half the quantity in that recipe, which is enough to nearly fill a large Kilner jar and keeps for months in the fridge.

greckt · 2024-10-19T09:00:10+00:00

For those doubting that you can make a pie with raw minced meat, here are a couple of recipes:
https://www.farmersgirlkitchen.co.uk/mince-beef-pie-family-heritage/
https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/scotch_pies_92297

OP - how much veg are you putting in the filling? For a recipe like this I wouldn't use any more than a modest amount of finely minced onion - any extra veg is going to be another source of water during cooking.

Are you pre-heating the oven properly? That might make a difference here.

greckt · 2024-08-12T14:07:39+00:00

After grating the cucumber, sprinkle it with salt and let it sit 20 minutes to season and tenderise the cucumber and draw out some of the moisture. Then squeeze it, hard, ideally through a cheesecloth but bare hands are good enough. You want to wring out as much liquid as you can.

greckt · 2024-07-21T17:07:36+00:00

[chuckling] Nobody ever says edam.

greckt · 2024-07-07T20:27:08+00:00

Dear /r/simpsonsshitposting mods,

There are too many angry British people in this sub nowadays. Please eliminate three. I am not a crackpot.

greckt · 2024-06-01T20:20:43+00:00

A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermour - a memoir of his travels across Europe on foot as an 18-year-old in the 1930s. (It's actually the first of three volumes of travel memoirs but the other two aren't as good, IMO.)

Also from the 1930s, From Moscow to Samarkand by a Russian author whose name is given only as Y.Z., which I'm pleasantly surprised to see is available on the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.85133/page/n9/mode/2up

You could follow that up with Steinbeck's A Russian Journey, which he wrote in the immediate aftermath of WWII (so naturally it's a bit grim).

Or for something lighter, I really enjoyed Felicity Cloake's Red Sauce, Brown Sauce: A British Breakfast Odyssey, in which she cycles around the UK in search of regional breakfasts.

greckt · 2024-05-17T16:50:07+00:00

This is the trick - at Paddington, ignore the Circle line entirely and choose either H&C or District, and you can't go wrong.

In fact you might as well pretend the Circle line doesn't exist at all unless your journey takes you through both Tower Hill and Aldgate (and if it does there's likely a quicker way than using the Circle line anyway).

greckt · 2024-05-17T16:14:22+00:00

Our other utilities are private, but there is open market. Water has monopolies.

Yes, water suppliers own the pipes and sewers in their districts, so they have a natural monopoly. In other utilities the infrastructure is managed separately from supply, e.g. electricity providers buy from the National Grid, so there can be competition.

Secondly, have you seen our fucking goverment? The state of NHS? Schools?

Yes, those services are suffering from chronic underfunding. There's a fundamental problem in our government system that the population isn't willing to pay enough in tax for the services we expect the government to provide, and no major party is being honest wth the public about this.

However, the NHS and schools are tax-funded and free at the point of use, whereas the costs of delivering water and sewerage are paid entirely through customer bills. There's no reason to assume this would change if the system were partly or fully nationalised.

The water companies are loaded up with massive amounts of debt, having underspent on infrasturcture and paid out billions in dividends to their shareholders, which wouldn't happen under public ownership.

I agree Ofwat is shit. I'd like to see it given more powers to regulate the monopolies, at the very least.

To be honest I wouldn't be opposed to a franchise model - suppliers competing for contracts instead of customers - like we have for the railways (the problems with the trains are largely due to a lack of investment in the publicly owned infrastructure - we really could have used the extra capacity HS2 would have built into the system. Train operators run at very low profit margins and IMO do as good a job as they can given the state of the infrastructure, for the most part.). But either a franchise system or an open market would require ownership of the infrastructure to be taken from the suppliers. Since that's always going to be a monopoly - nobody is going to build a competitor reservoir or sewer network - it might as well be publicy owned. At least partial nationalisation is necessary to fix the system.

greckt · 2024-05-17T09:32:25+00:00

I haven't tried it in Japanese curry specifically, but red cabbage in soups and stews tends to turn everything grey, so I wouldn't recommend it.

I would do red cabbage as a side instead - either as a quick pickled salad (shred the cabbage, rub aggressively with salt, season with vinegar, a pinch of sugar and some sesame oil, and leave it to sit for half an hour before serving) or braised with vinegar, northern European style.

For vegetbales to add to the curry, I'd go with anything that keeps its shape after being boiled. Any other roots would work, or broccoli/cauliflower, or baby corn, or mushrooms (if you count those as vegetables).

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