TonyC wrote:i did the right thing by NOT cooking at home. by the time i'm done, pretty much any resemblance of romance has drained out of me.
After one particularly spendy and disappointing Valentine's dinner at a restaurant when we still lived in NYC, I vowed never to go out on this occasion again. I choose, instead, to cook at home, but I now realize the libido-snuffing pitfalls of taking on the task of making a romantic Valentine's feast, as TonyC points out.
I had such great success with the
sausage-making endeavour, I'm now obsessed with grinding meat. I ground up a few strip steaks--bought on major sale--that were slightly freezer burned (due to getting lost in the depths of a cube freezer...but I digress) and some boneless pork country ribs (which I now realize were probably too fatty for the recipe) and purchased ground veal (the only kind Dominick's had) to make homemade bolognese.
It's not a difficult recipe, but the problem started when I decided, 'WTF, I've got at least a pound of each type of meat, why not quadruple the recipe?', which called for 1/4 pound of ground beef, pork and veal. So I did.
If only I had read the recipe start to finish, and realized that the cooking time for a single recipe was three hours, a doubled recipe would be four hours...you do the math. Say, five or six hours of slow and low simmering time?
The recipe requires the liquids (first milk, then white wine) to evaporate. When you jump from one cup of each liquid...to FOUR, well, it takes a long time.
I started prepping at 3, so the milk simmer started around 4, the wine simmer started at around 5, the addition of the tomatoes and reserved liquid happened around 6...and then the real cooking started. Suffice it to say, we didn't have bolognese, sauteed rapini and a lovely bottle of red for dinner. We had turkey cold cut sandwiches and beer. Oh, and three (yes, three) tasty Vosges truffles.
But it's hard to get mad at a misfired dinner when I still have a refrigerator and freezer full of delicious bolognese.