What I ate this week

apologies, these are not my meatballs

What I ate this week. Well, the week ended with my own recipe sausage meatball papardelle, but instead of papardelle, which I can't get in Asdas, I used linguine. It's a recipe I've been using since we came back from Florence in August, and is so simple I have cooked it every week since then. Basically you get some nice italian or italian style sausages, extract the meat and roll into balls, say three per suasage, then you fry these for 20 mins or so, then you add a pint of pasatta, and a little cream, then you mix it with some linguine, mix it all through, and there you have it, sprinkle a bit of parmesan over the top, it's delish, and madly simple. Note I don't add any seasoning - that's because the italian sausages have all the flavour and seasoning you need, you don't need to add anything, though I suppose a few fennel seeds wouldn't go amiss.
           The night before I did another almost weekly favourite, which is a chicken tagine, taken from that book called every recipe you'll ever need, 4 ways to cook everything, I can't remember who it's by, but it's a great recipe - it's not actually in that book, this came from one of his Sunday Times (or is it saturday Times?) pages. It's another stunningly simple but brilliantly flavourful dish, you just fry some sliced onion and garlic for ten mins, add the special tagine spice mix ras-al-hanout, plus some ground ginger, add some chicken thigh fillets, just 200 mls of chicken stock, a handful of green olives, cover and simmer for an hour. You don't of course, have to use a tagine. In fact I never have. But in this the trick seems to be to use this small amount of liquid, and keep the lid on, because the end result has just the right amount of thick sauce, the thickening seeming to come from the spices themselves, and no reduction is necessary. But it's delish with some pomegranate-sprinkled couscous and a crunchy salad.
           Then on Wednesday I had another weekly standard (it's all been old-reliables this week, I don't know why, had a sudden panic when doing the weekly list) spag bol, but using Gino de Campo's recipe, he says its his grandad's, and it worked very well, the secret being to add milk to the usual ingredients, and to have it with taglietelli instead of spaghetti, which holds the sauce better. Probably agree. But the one trick I thought was very valuable was to break up the mince with your fingers before adding to the pan, that way you get a nice fine granular texture to the meat, rather than the worms or strings that minced meat often retains in cooking. His version was close to the famous 3 hour butter ragu in Hazan's essentials of italian cooking. Gino also said to cook for 3 hours, but I only managed 1. Still, the longer you can keep it on the stove, the better. What else - my wife cooked our other two meals this week - a fabulous minestrone which lasted for two subsequent lunches, and an aubergine and spaghetti thing, which seemed to remind the children that they don't like that particular vegetable.