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Ok.. it’s time.
I’ve been holding out on a lot of people (read: 4) on what goes into my bolognese, but im getting close to getting it right, just when i ate a bowl of bolognese when I was a kid from Italian friends at primary school.
So after much deliberation, a lot of bowls of bolognese and a lot of experimentation, here’s the first publication (albeit small scale) of my bolognese recipe.
So, if you can get hold of some take-away containers, its a lot nicer to buy ingredients in bulk, and freeze the fuckers. it makes for a delicious hangover lunch, a delicious late night booze marathon snack or a very nice ‘I really can’t be fucked cooking today’ meal for lazy housemates and family alike. So beg borrow or steal a really big soup pot from someone and get going..
Hot Tip Number 1. The Victoria Market sells really cheap mince on Sundays. Like $3 a kilo cheap. So get stocked up.
Hot Tip Number 2. There’s a wholesale food place on A’Beckett St, get onto the 2.5kg tins of crushed tomatoes. They’re also cheap. Sorry, these places are in Melbourne.. i’m sure if you’re reading this from elsewhere there’ll be similarly cheap places to buy produce.
Ingredients
4kg Mince
Soup bones (a mixture is good.. pork and veal preferably..)
A really gelatinous cut of pork – tail, cheeks, ears or trotter
1 2.5 Kg tin of Crushed Tomatoes
Half a Bunch of Celery, ribbed and chopped really fine
1 Kg Brown Onions, Diced super fine
3 Big Carrots, finely grated
4 Cloves of Garlic, Crushed and pressed into a paste
1 Litre (1 bottle is enough, but 1litre is better..) of Red Wine
1 litre of water
12 Bay leaves (preferably fresh ones..)
8 Cloves
4 Cinnamon Quills
10-15 Stalks of Parsley
1 Cup Tomato Paste
Salt and Pepper to season.
Method:
First, put the bones into a pre-heated oven to roast. They should be ready once they’re ready to go into the sauce.
Saute the veggies (onions a minute or two before everything else) for several minutes until they’re just coloured, constantly stirring all the time so the carrots don’t catch.
Once thats done add the mince , and work it so it A) doesn’t clump together and B) cooks through properly. It takes a bit with this sort’ve volume but it’s better than paying some stooge at a gym for training. How many Nonna’s have you met that couldn’t break your arm?
Hot Tip Number 3: Leave the mince out of the fridge to come to room temperature, which means it will sear, rather that boil and lose all its juice. all the liquid will evaporate later and take away part of the rich meat flavour.
Now the meat is cooked through, its time to add the tomato paste, stir it through so it incorporates and then add the wine. Let the wine simmer down so the veggie, meat, wine and tomato paste concoction darkens and starts becoming fragrant. The alcohol begins to tenderise the meat which is crucial.
So, the wine has evaporated and the meat is becoming fragrant and looks a dark’ish’ shade of purple/red. Take the bones out of the oven, then should be golden, with a few parts where the bone has blackened. You’d be able to smell they’re roasted.. put them back in for a little longer if not, its not the end of the world. If they’re done, chuck em in, at the same time add the (uncooked) trotter, cheek, tail or ears (I prefer the ears. They make for a fun photo) into the mix, then add the Crushed Tomato, Bay Leaves, Parsley, Cinnamon and Cloves, followed by half the tomato tin of water.
Bring to a gentle simmer and let simmer for 2-3 hours, longer if you like. But make sure of this: You have to keep an eye on it! Put the kettle on, organise a copy of The Running Man and turn your brain off for a few hours. Just yell out to whoever is walking past the stove to give it a good stir.
Hot Tip number 4: The easiest way to add the bay leaves is still on the stem. Then you can pull them all out in one go once its cooked. The other spices and the parsley, tie them up in muslin, or better still, put them into a big re-usable tea container so you can use it again next time.
Then its done! Pull out and discard the bones and the pork, and pour into other containers once its cooled down a little.
It tastes nice on day one, better on day two once the sauce has been chilled and then re-heated (better on the stove, rather than the microwave.)
Serve with thick pasta, or shaped pasta like Pappardelle, Tagliatelle, Rigatoni, Penne or Orrechetti. Once it’s cold, it spreads well onto lasagne too.. which is another story for another day.
Note: Don’t be scared of cooking with cuts of pork like cheeks, trotter, ears or tail. They’re delicious, and any time you eat demi-glace or most sauces in fancy restaurants, they have some gelatinous cut in it. So buck up and get into it.
Love it!
fresh piece. more photos coming soon oooh yeah
Monkey Loves Funk (137.6MB)
Get in to get down. Keep it funky
(ps.. i can’t believe its taken this long to make a mixtape.. ah well.. more to come. its way fun..)
I cut off my moustache today. I’ve been painting all night and went a little crazy from enamel fumes..
It seemed to make sense.. ah well.. photos tomorrow.
Gertrudes brown Couch new artwork out back!
ps check out the brand new dance!
Monkeys Soul Revue gettin down on the 23rd of May..
quick quick!
check it out..
from getnotmag.com
“Monkey is an old-timer. If St Jeromes was an RSL he’d be the oldest tea-drinking, Two-Up-playing, cane-shaking coot there was. Monkey has seen many boozy nights and has often been the cause of them. He painted most of the walls at ye olde St Jeromes and has DJed there more times than he can remember. Now he’s compiling a book for St Jeromes to commemorate – as he puts it – “six years of misplaced hangovers and misspent youth.”
fresh new piece finished today from out the back of my folks house..
click through for a larger image
get in
So St Jeromes closed a month ago, and I’ve been a little sad about it. I don’t know what to do with my friday nights anymore.. I have to pay for beer, think of things to do.. all that.
But, in honour, we had a smashfest last weekend, and on the last saturday me, Meggs and Drewfunk got this little piece up.. Get in
Sorry for the lack of fun.. but its been a whirlwind since leaving Europe to coming home and basically still feeling like i’m on holiday.. but for good measure heres the basic standard of what I’ve been doing since I’ve been home. Getting my dirty mug on front covers of newspapers. BAM!
Get a load of this..
more antipodean hotness to come soon..
look at that dirty mugshot
So after the brief sojourn with the Lyonnaise Police department behind me, i headed to Grenoble.. A little city up in the mountains, away from Paris which was fun.. It also, as i found out later happened to be in the Chartreuse region of the world..
So after a few days hanging out with my mate Olivier, i jumped on a train to Geneva, where i was going to meet up with a guy off couchsurfing, who lived in this crazy punk house.. got to his house, called him up and he was at this party on the other side of town.. i dumped my bags and headed off on a bus, cross town. 5am and a dozen supermarket beers later it was party time back at the punk house..
stayed in geneva a very expensive 3 days, and an even more expensive train trip back to france, to go to Mulhouse to visit my buddy Anthony, where it was Vin Chaud all the way to the top..
(sorry. im the mucous man at the moment.. i cant think of anything clever to write..)
But in other News, the fun news.. From Mulhouse, the plan was always to hitch-hike to Berlin.. or at least somewhere in Germany.
So i woke up at like 6am, hopped on a bus out of town and walked to the freeway onramps, and wrote a sign on my sketchbook to ‘Allemagne’ (the french dont have similar names for countries like everyone else.. they just have to be different.) After 30 minutes of waiting, some Europcar guys took me to the border and dropped me at the bridge to Germany. I walked across, which was nice, i suppose.. From there, Frank drove me to Freiborg, and talked to me about some exchange students from melbourne who are staying with him.. Affie drove me in his truck from Freiborg to Offenberg with his Border Collie.. i waited in the rain talking to Gorge from Bulgaria who was the toilet attendent at a truckstop there, for about 2 hours, before Miroslav from Slovakia drove me to a truckstop just north of Frankfurt, when for the first time ever, i actually awarded myself a vague point..
Thinking to myself.. “Why the fuck have they concreted all the embankments next to the Autobahn?? and why does it extend beyond the embankments?? Whats the point??” This being in the centre of Germany, where it has on occasion been known to snow. A lot.. It took me about 20 minutes to figure that one out.. So Bessie – look out, I’m catching up.
Tony the Portuguese/German drove me from Frankfurt to Hannover, where i stupidly thought it would be cheap/easy to catch a train from there to Berlin. Trains to the capital? go all the time dont they? and cheap? no on both counts. I was too exhausted and couldnt be arsed anymore so i bought a ticket, some beers and caught a train to a small city kinda in between the two and got drunk and fell asleep at the station.. (By this stage it was midnight..) I got to Berlin 27 hours after id left Mulhouse, which by all accounts is pretty quick for hitching.. Fun times though.. it turns out every single truck driver smokes like a champion, so it was great fun riding high above everyone else, swearing in different languages and smoking millions of cigarettes..
So Berlin huh? Fun city. Easy to be poor (like me.. im getting into calling the folks territory fast.)
So thats it for now. Its beer beer beer, poland on the weekend, gluhwein at night, and vegan cooking. Good times.
Back in london on the 17th of December. In time to be even more poor..
Monkey and the Bandits 