I’m on a roll!  Two blog posts in two days – who knew?!  And I even managed to study on Sunday too.  Such a productive day.

I held the sixth Bolognese night last night, sadly this will be the last in my current home (but onto bigger and better things, and the next phase).  I had the newly married couple over – CONGRATULATIONS!  Now, I knew as soon as I saw this recipe (from The Art of Pasta by David Dale and Lucio Galletto), that I just had to make it for Karinda and Steve.  Why, you ask?  Well, there are a few things Steve doesn’t eat.  One of these things used to be figs, until he ate them here (I didn’t know at the time that he didn’t actually like figs).  Steve also doesn’t like mushrooms or prawns, both of which Karinda loves.  So, I’m on a mission.  A mission to introduce these things to Steve, and in a way so he may like them.  I threatened to make a prawn Bolognese, but that just didn’t seem fair.

I was rather blown away as they brought not one lovely bottle to enjoy, but two!  So over the course of the evening, we enjoyed Moet & Chandon Champagne, and a beautiful Morambro Creek Chardonnay.  We also enjoyed The Stag Chardonnay.  Mmmm, yum.

To soak up some of that champagne goodness, we nibbled on pea bruschetta canapes – the entrée I did last month, shrunk to nibbles proportions and it suited the lovely weather perfectly, as the bright colour and fresh flavour reminds me of spring.  I do believe that they were thoroughly enjoyed by everyone!

Now, if you follow me on Instagram, you would have seen in late July that I went to Tipo 00 on Little Bourke Street in Melbourne, and enjoyed burrata (not to mention an AMAZING truffle and mushroom risotto, OMG, I want more).  That was my very first time eating burrata, and wow, it was creamy deliciousness that I wanted more of.  I also want to make it from scratch but I’m not quite there yet.  However, I knew I could use it at my next Bolognese night so when I saw a recipe for a warm caprese salad (recipe from The Busy Life cookbook), I knew that was the next entrée.  Slow roasted cherry truss tomatoes, homemade rustic basil pesto (minus the garlic) and the burrata…mmmmmhmmmm, simple flavours but bursting with flavour and texture.  Please expect to see me make this one again and again…and again, for good measure!

Simple nibbles and a simple entrée in preparation for the main event…and this one differed quite a bit overall to others previously made by me (to clarify, as noted in the cookbook, Bolognese has been defined by a delegation of the Accademia Italiana delle Cucina as consisting of beef, pancetta, onion, carrot, celery, tomato paste, broth, white wine and milk or cream).  This bolognese consists of a very specific 100g each of carrot, celery and onion to make the soffritto cooked in butter and EVOO with 100g of pancetta until the smell comes together as one.  Add in the meats: 300g each of beef and veal mince, and the meat taken from two pork sausages, as well as 60g dried porcini mushrooms soaked in boiling water for 15mins (though they said to discard the amazing porcini stock left behind which I just couldn’t do, so it’s now frozen waiting for me to make a mushroom risotto!) and 75g of chicken livers.  Brown the meat and cook until most of the water released from the meats has evaporated.  Add white wine, three bay leaves and a ‘mazzetto odoroso’ – herbs wrapped in muslin and tied with string, and in this case, the herbs were supposed to be fresh oregano, rosemary, sage and thyme but I somehow missed the sage and thyme from the recipe and substituted some dried thyme instead.  Stir and wait until you smell that the wine has evaporated, and add triple concentrated tomato paste, only three tablespoons mind you, along with 250ml water.  Cook this for an hour – one of the shortest cooking times of all the Bolognese’s I’ve made.  After this time, add 150ml milk and cook for another 30mins and voila, we had Bolognese.

And yum, what a scrumptious Bolognese it was!  We all thoroughly enjoyed it, with Steve giving it the highest rating of 12.5 and noting it was ‘well balanced and sophisticated’, as well as being ‘complex’ and having an ‘intense herb flavour, as if the infusion had been cooked over several hours.  I did however fail as a host as he was hoping I’d offer a second helping.  Ah Steve,  you’re family now, you can ask!! :p Also, Steve didn’t pick up on the flavour of the porcini mushrooms, and was thoroughly surprised!!

Karinda rated it at 12 (her second highest, so pretty impressive!  Karinda did note that it was a ‘different colour to the others, much browner’ (though as Karinda wasn’t at the last one, it was actually quite similar in colour to that one) and it seemed ‘richer and creamier’.  I’d also like to note Karinda would come back for it again 🙂

So where does this one rank?  Overall, it has nudged Not Quite Nigella’s authentic Bolognese recipe to third place, and has taken a very proud second – a fabulous recipe that I think you’ll be pleased to make and enjoy.  Let me know your thoughts if you do.

To finish the evening, I served the same poached pears as last month as Karinda loves a poached pear.  I was going to tweak the marscapone mousse and add chocolate to it, but got a little side-tracked as I was a tad time crunched.  Nevertheless, it was just as tasty as last month and all bowls were pretty damn clean at the end!

Now, I do need to warn you, it will soon be time to move on to other foodie adventures so Bolognese Nights will be coming to an end in the near(ish) future. When, I’m not yet sure but I do assure you there will be a grand finale.

Until next time…

Buon Appetito xx