Thank you, last summer, for the tomato sauce...

When you're home late, you're cold, you shouldn't be because it's mid-May, but it's been raining on and off all day... pasta with sauce made last August is all that anybody really needs.

Last summer, I made an utterly basic tomato sauce with tomatoes from the farm down the road. The pots had just sat in the cupboard all through winter, me periodically glancing at them, and thinking that winter hadn't got that bad yet.

Winter never did get that bad. But spring did. We had three weeks of spring, everything blossomed, flowered, there were drifts of petals swirling past our windows, then we had two weeks of glorious summer during which I got sunburned twice, and ... suddenly... it became early spring again.

By which I mean it got cold, started to rain, got colder, went on raining, and was generally unpleasant. Is generally unpleasant. I have had to put my sandals away and get my wellies back out! Brrrr...

And therefore, after spending the day outside at a barbecue, we were all cold, hoping that we hadn't caught cold, and craving something warm, smooth, and ultimately comforting.

There are few things more comforting than pasta. Pasta with lots of rich, oily tomato sauce. Pasta that you can bury your head in, and pull up over your cold feet like a lovely fleece blanket. Pasta that loves you, and loves your tummy, and doesn't care that it's been waiting in the cupboard for the last 9 months...

My best Bolognese

I made this for a family and friends lunch party during the holidays, and served it on fresh fettucine. I was asked for the recipe from all participants- and both husbands insisted on me giving it to their wives! (Peter just smirked.)

Well, I'm a nice girl...

about 750g minceed beef
about 350g minced pork
2 packs of 3 thick slices of lard fume, cut into lardons that aren't too thin (if you cut them too thin, it just melts, and I like the odd bit of bacon in my sauce!)
3 big carrots, peeled, diced
2-3 onions
1/2 a head of garlic (or a whole head, up to you), sliced, it melts into the sauce so you don't need to cut it too finely
1 bottle of red wine
2 litres passata/coulis de tomates
some water
pepper, no salt because of the lard, oregano, other spices, chili flakes
cooking olive oil
some full-fat milk- about 1 dl

In a big casserole dish, heat some olive oil gently, add the oniongs, garlic and carrot, season with pepper, herbs and chili, put the lid on and cook gently. When the onions are translucid and the carrot softening, pour the bottle of wine in.

At the same time, in a frying pan cook the lardons without adding any oil. Put the meat into the casserole, leaving the fat in the pan. Cook the other meats in the fat (you might need to add some oil for the last batches!). Cook the meats separately, as you will need to keep on prodding the pork to make sure that it doesn't go into lumps, and don't put too much in the pan at the same time, or it will steam and won't brown. Add as you go along to the casserole.

Pour the passata into the caserole, add a bit of cold water for the sauce to cover the meat. Stir, bring to a boil, turn down, and simmer for at least three hours. Longer is better- five hours is perfect!

Turn the heat off, leave overnight. The next morning, spoon the fat off- you'll understand why when you take the lid off! Heat it gently, for about 40 minutes to an hour, until you are ready to serve it up. Season with pepper, and, five minutes before serving, pour in the milk, stir it in.

As I said- I served it with fettucine, as I understand that the traditional way of serving involves tagliatelle, but I didn't want to be fiddling with dried pasta and fresh pasta takes hardly any time to cook! We also had a big green salad.

Garlic for Greta

What I usually do, cooking for Greta, is to make large-ish batches of things, divide it up into portions, and freeze them. I then put them into ziploc bags, labelled with what it is and the date, and feel secure in knowing that I just have to pull something out of the freezer in the morning and microwave it for 45 seconds in the evening.

Her dishes always have to have some garlic in it, or she'll turn her nose up and spit it out at me.

This morning, her busily making a mess around my ankles, I took a head of garlic out of the drawer, started to take it apart, and realised that it was made up of about 5 cloves! I peeled those, cut them into four, and put them through what I call the smacky- the chopper with the piston you pump up and down. I put plenty of olive oil in a saucepan, and when that was hot, I tipped in the garlic and took it off the heat, stirring it all around as it cooked. I then left it off the heat whilst I continued preparations.

I took out a medium-sized courgette, sliced and chopped it, put that through the smacky as well, added it to the garlic, stirred, put it back on the heat, and added some black pepper.

Now, as she will only eat a little of most things, it's a case of having to get as many food groups in as possible, so I took out a block of tofu, repeated the chopping and smacky part, and, when the courgettes were soft, added the tofu. I stirred that around, let it heat up again.



When it was bubbling gently, I added passata, and cooked it down for about 10-15 minutes. I also added some of the cooking water from the pasta I was doing on the side.

We'll see tonight whether she tolerates this latest effort of mine.

And if not, I also made peach and greengage compote with saffron honey for her to spit out and make faces at.

Jurassic Cooking

Greta, as I do believe I have mentioned several times before, is a toddler with... particular tastes in food. She likes what she likes, and most of the time, she doesn't like whatever it is that I'm waving in front of her mouth, hoping like mad that she'll actually open up and try a bite.

Except for things like garlic sausage, cheese with garlic, Cenovis (Swiss Marmite/Vegemite), old gruyère, radishes (the hotter the better), and assorted other foods that babies are just not supposed to like. On the other hand- mashed potato is disgusting, mashed banana is beyond even contemplation, cooked carrot is evil, and all the usual baby foods recommended in the books are utterly rejected.

Greta therefore spent her first few months of "solids" being fed out of jars, as I got tired of her throwing everything that I cooked for her with love and devotion onto the floor. At least with jarred food, when she screamed the place down at every spoon, I didn't feel like she was rejecting my cooking! However, once we moved, I decided to try again. And to add garlic.

She started eating a bit more, but then the warm weather intervened. Greta, rather like her parents, is a cold-weather person. And for the last couple of months, whenever the temperature went over 25C (i.e. most of the time), well... Greta didn't want to eat. We managed by feeding her Petits Suisses at every meal, but that's not hugely healthy. I did usually manage to get the odd spoonful of apple-sauce into her to salve my vitamin-conscious soul, but more than that, well, NO, Mama! And so my carefully crafted home-made portions of baby food have been either washed down the sink (in the case of, for example, courgette risotto with chicken), or dumped in the bin (pasta with tomato sauce and tofu).

Finally, praise the lords and pass the biscuits, the weather has begun to cool. And the effect on Greta's appetite has been quite impressive. From an average daily consumption (excluding milk and water) of maybe 2 Petits Suisses, 2 tablespoonfuls of fruit, and a couple of mouthfuls of something else random, usually all accompanied by howls and much struggling... she's suddenly chomping down on 200g of food at a sitting. The only reason it's not more is that I find myself holding back, worried that she's going to throw up!

On the way back from the walk today I stopped off at the farm, and picked up another 3kg of tomatoes, as well as some plums and some mirabelles. I intend to make plum jam later in the week, but as I'm out of sugar, it won't be today.

I put aside about 1kg of the tomatoes for salads and sandwiches- the others I skinned, de-seeded, chopped extremely roughly, and put in a pan. I cooked them for I think about 45 minutes, crushing them with a wooden spoon, adding only a bit of salt and pepper. In the mean time, in the water I'd used to briefly boil the tomatoes to help with the peeling, I cooked some small pasta shapes. Next to that, I steamed a chopped courgette.

Having bottled most of the tomato coulis, once it was thick enough (this is going in the basement for winter), I added what was left to a small bowl of the pasta, with some of the courgettes, and a good dollop of olive oil. Let's see what she makes of that for her dinner.

My food plans for this week, other than the aforementioned plum jam, includes making a lot more tomato coulis, as well as tomato sauce, for jarring and stashing for the cold season. I'm thinking tomato and basil sauce, tomato and courgette sauce, tomato and aubergine...

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Later edit: She did not like it. She spat out five teaspoonfuls one after the other, making a face, then started shaking her head NO and preparing to cry. I gave up. Peter ate it instead, and said it was delicious.

Back to the drawing board!