Casual Conversation

Make a bunch and freeze it, now you have premade meals of the good shit whenever you want.

PS. I'm heading to the shop now to buy all the ingredients I need to make this, gota start soon else I'll eat way too late.
Can't not make it at least once a week.

Make a big batch once per week on the weekend and portion it out into easy, freezable individual servings. It can still be your easy go-to meal if you make a week or two worth of sauce all at once. Cook the pasta fresh, reheat your frozen sauce in a microwave, combine and enjoy.

Why not make it in bulk once a week, enough for a few servings? And I probably don’t need to tell you this… but keep it in the fridge/freezer

Also please share the recipe, I’m interested!

Excellent work, that just means you need a new dish to iterate on! And the cycle can continue.

Maybe in future experimentation try to prioritize timeliness? That's easier said than done though. Your journey with bolognese is similar to mine with shakshuka, so I feel I understand. It's impossible to turn off my desire to improve things and resulting brainstorms on the topic.

Does it freeze well? When I used to be extra as hell with Bolognese, I would do batch cooking and it went pretty well, especially if I wasn't super lazy with how I defrosted it.

Making my own tortillas has done this to tacos for me. It doesn't add a ton of complexity, but the extra time takes what was a super fast zero effort process, and now makes it about as involved as any other simple dish to cook. But it's SO much better that I can never go back.

Bolognese is obe of my favorites as well, but it's like a 4-5 hour process, yeah. Feeds me for a solid week, though, more than anything else I cook.

You can go further. I also make my sauce from scratch, but then pressure cook some beef chuck or shanks in it with red wine. Then I make my own pasta to go with.

And it’s good it takes so long because I would be too fat to make it otherwise.

Sounds nice, I personally like taking time to cook good food. Can we have the recipe?

I hear you, but you might be able to decouple the lazy version and the fancy one. I love pasta al pesto. I have the lazy version (sauce from the store, chuck it in) and the fancy version (start with basil…). One is a comfort food in rough times, the other a delicacy I can only savor a handful of times a year. Both are great in their respective roles.

There's no prize to perfection, only an end to pursuit

Make a big-ass batch once every month or three. Freeze 90% of it to eat later. Cooking 10x as much is not much more effort than cooking 1x.

I'm blursed with a weak sense of smell/taste. This can't happen to me, I would barely be able to tell the two recipes apart. But on the other hand, I'm pretty sure I'm missing a lot of the enjoyment people have with really good food.

Simple solution.

Get a big, big pot and make a f%%k ton of sauce once a month.

Get containers and freeze them.

I make chili and lentil soup this way; I've got plenty of each sitting in the freezer. I mostly keep it for days I am sick or just don't feel like cooking.

If you don't have a good sized freezer check online. You can find one that's about as much floor space as a chair that holds plenty.

I know what you mean, but there's hope yet. If you specifically don't want advice... ignore quite a lot of this, I guess, I'm just grabbing the excuse to nerd out

If you have a freezer, you're good, bolognese is decent freezer food, you can prep a silly amount and "flatpack", and be set for ages.

Browning the meat doesn't sound like a huge part of the overall effort, but if it's a pain, halfass or skip it. You don't need a separate pot, just do it in your main one. Depends on how set you are on the browned flavors, one upside to browning less of it is that it'll be more tender since the meat structure seizes up on aggressive heating.

Mincing veg, maybe especially the carrot, is a fucking pain, but you can grate or process them instead, or conceivably just skip the carrots at least. Especially with the processor it's stupid quick and you can freeze that too, since it goes in a wet cook and the texture isn't important.

Anything you do skip, there's probably a way to "cheat" and at least partially make up for it. Beef fond, soy, Maggi and/or fish sauce, sugar, onion/garlic granules, maybe a careful pinch of some warming spices or cocoa. Adds "complexity" and whatnot from shelf stable stuff that doesn't need prepping

(Since you mentioned fiber, I can endorse lentils with/besides/instead of the meat too. Red split lentils stew down really easily and add body)

By far my favorite dish in the world, and it's fucking expensive and takes TIME.

Use only fresh tomatoes, the best you can find, at least 1,5-2 kg, the more the better. Halve them, put in a whachu call, glass oven pan, pour over some olive oil and salt and maybe a clove of garlic stuck inside one of the tomatoes (so it don't burn), and into the oven at around 175-180 degrees C. Point is you want to lightly roast the skin, so it caramelizes. Once it does you can lower the temperature to 125 or lower, even 100 or 80, and it can simmer and stew forever, the longer the better. Just keep reducing until it's thick. If it gets too thick just add water or wine.

Tomatoes need LONG TIME to really release flavor. Thats why the sauce always tastes better the next day. This is for the tomatoes only, not even talking the rest of the sauce but that's the foundation for sure. White or red wine helps a lot. Onions are non negotiable, but there's a point of dininishing returns of adding ingredients and spices.

One secret trick also is to mix- hear me out, filet of sardine, I don't know what they're called, it's like these very salty very thin fish filets that come in a jar and usually sunflower oil.

They release a ton of umami and melt into the sauce without a trace, and it doesn't taste like fish at all.

There's a bunch of other things obv but those are the spechal tacticks for the connoisseurs already in here.

I make noodles with red sauce fairly frequently. I just get a big, 28oz, can of whole peeled tomatoes, no Calcium Bicarbonate because that makes the tomatoes taste like crap. I dunno the whole can of tomatoes in a pot on the stove with some basil and let it reduce for 30 minutes to an hour.

If I'm feeling fancy I put a minced onion or shallot with some butter in before the tomatoes.

Anyway, salt to taste, add a little of this or that for umami... Boil some noods and bam it's done. Top noods with sauce and it's a fine dish. Add some cheese if you feel kinky.

Tomato, Basil, salt. What a dream.

Cautionary story, that one. Better be careful with the way I refine my easy stew. Currently, everything about it is pretty random, but at least it’s low-effort cooking. Better keep it that way.