We love you Eren Spaghetti Bolognese

Today is a very special day to lazy cooks. And on such a special day instead of crying ‘why we are not with Eren on his 30th birthday as there are thousand miles between us’, we decided to cook one of his favorite foods (and lazy cooks’ as well) and celebrate his 30th with a huge Spaghetti Bolognese and a very good bottle of red wine.

This special dish is a classic for the lazy cook kitchen especially for the Saturday evenings when the weekend is over and we invite over couple of friends and start to cook early as the sauce needs to be cooked for at least two hours for all the ingredients to be blended and so you cannot distinguish while you’re eating where the bacon is or the mushroom or the celery within the sauce. I cannot remember which recipe we were using in the beginning. I think with each bolognese recipe we saw, we added a new feature. 

So we fried pancetta in melted butter for 5-6 min, then added onions, garlic and continued frying for a few more minutes. Added chopped carrot and celery; tucked in the bay leaves and cooked for another five minutes. Then we put in the beef and broke with a fork; fried for a few more minutes, then added the tomatoes, stock, wine and spices. This is cooked on low heat (barely bubbling) for an hour. Then we added the cream and cooked for another half hour. And the pasta was cooked al dente and ta-daaa... Ah, of course lots of grated cheese.

Happy birthday Eren. 30s are the best (seriously). We love you and looking forward to building our voltran again ‘iki su bir misir (or iki misir!)’ very very soon.

Ingredients for 4

- 70 gr of cubed pancetta

- 1 carrot

- 2 sticks of celery

- 1 medium onion

- 2 cloves of garlic

- 1 good quality canned tomato

- 500 gr minced beef or lamb (or combination)

- grated nutmeg

- few bay leaves

- some oregano

- 200 ml red wine

- 200 ml vegetable stock (cubes are fine)

- 100 gr mushrooms

- 150 ml of cooking cream

- 50 gr butter

- grated pecorino or Parmesan