I love hearty meals but I hate cooking dishes that take more than a few minutes of preparation. I also tend to stock my fridge with random produce rather than with specific ingredients for pre-planned meals. As long as they are fresh and healthy, I throw them into my fridge and figure out how to eat them later.
With my lawless approach to meal planning, I’ve never had the right ingredients to make my beloved Spaghetti Bolognese. So, what did I do? Rather than changing my habit, I’ve learnt to make it with whatever I have in the fridge. As long as I have minced beef and red wine, I’m good to go. So far, nobody has been rushed to hospital after eating my Bolognese-ish dish. So, it must be edible.
The other day, then, when I saw a half finished bottle of red wine in the fridge, (it wasn’t mine, honest!) I decided to make Spaghetti Bolognese. I took out my backbone ingredients for my sauce.
A glass of red wine (most important!)
A pack of minced beef (500g)
A fat onion
Garlic powder (about 1 tsp)
A tin of chopped tomatoes (400g)
1 Oxo cube
Some salt
I chopped the onion as quickly as I could, blowing it hard all the time so that the fumes wouldn’t come near my face. I reasoned that impersonating a gold fish is better than having stingy eyes.
Then I looked in my fridge for any vegetables that I could throw in. I found two courgettes, a starting-to-shrivel carrot and an aubergine. I pulled them out and chopped them into chunks. None of them lost their skin in the process. They only got a generous wash.
I got my biggest wok out, heated some oil and fried the onions. Then I browned the meat. I was dreamily sprinkling the powder ingredients over the meat when I heard an ear-splitting shriek which shocked me out of my master chef daintiness.
It was that stupid smoke alarm which can’t distinguish between smoke from a fire and that from cooking. It never learns even though I have angrily shouted at it countless times in various languages (most of them as yet unknown to mankind) that it keeps getting it wrong. So, my pleasant cooking session was interrupted by a frantic search for something to waft the smoke out of the vicinity of this smoke alarm. I found a piece of crushed card board box and the alarm eventually shut up in a sulk.
When I came back to cooking, I couldn’t remember whether I had put in any salt or not. So, I remembered this wisdom that I’d told myself many times: “If in doubt, don’t put any more in; you can always add more, but you can’t take it back.”
So, I put some in.
Then came my favourite part: I slowly poured in the red wine. Over the years, the amount of red wine I have put in my sauce has increased. (I wonder how that happened?) That day, I tipped in a whole glass of the stuff. Well … that bottle of red wine needed using up. Otherwise, it would have gone bad.
I let the wok bubble and then added the tomatoes. Then I put the vegetables in. First, the aubergine, then the carrots and finally the courgettes. I left about a five-minute gap between them because each vegetable cooks at a different speed.
There was another bout of shrieking from the smoke alarm. So, my reverie was once again interrupted while I had to engage in another wafting session.
When the sauce started boiling, I lowered the heat to simmering and closed the lid. I left it cooking on the hob for about 45 minutes, occasionally coming back to stir it.
I glared up at the smoke alarm, brandishing the beaten up cardboard box and asked, “Why can’t you let me pretend to be a chef just for a few minutes?” I said it in Burmese. I didn’t get an answer. I repeated the question in English, still no response. So, I got on with cooking some spaghetti. I took pity on a lonely block of Double Gloucester cheese shivering in the corner of the fridge and grated a generous amount from it to pile on top of my wine-infused Bolognese.
I put the spaghetti and the sauce in a bowl and ate it with a pair of chopsticks. I haven’t mastered the use of a fork with spaghetti even after all these years. But who cares? It was the enjoyment of the taste that mattered.
Particularly the red wine.