I'm making a note to myself—and maybe a quiet public declaration—that I will never cook traditional Bolognese sauce on a workday again. I have my own recipe, of course, because it's the national dish of Australia, so there are already about 25 million-plus variations on the traditional Bolognese ragu. It normally takes me about an hour to cook my version, but Jane wanted me to follow the Marcella Hazan recipe, which I knew involved three hours of simmering. I figured I’d put it together over lunch and just let it cook through the afternoon.
Yeah, nah, not so much.
Marcella Hazan. Destroyer of Deadlines.
I started at 2 p.m. and have just escaped the kitchen now at 4:25 p.m., and there’s still most of that three-hour simmer to come. I’m not sure where the time went, but it chewed up most of the afternoon. It wasn’t an unpleasant way to spend the day, of course, and I did get an ocular migraine at lunchtime before I’d even started cooking, so I don’t know how much writing or editing I would’ve done anyway. I had big plans to do a catch-up column for ASB and another Dan Black chapter for 3.2, but I suspect the brain fog might have been a bit thick to pull off either of those.
Following Marcella’s recipe for Bolognese ragu was about the limit of my abilities today. I’ll take a picture and let you know how it turns out a bit later.