When I was at Vons last week, I found some 93% lean ground beef on sale for $2.57 so I decided to make some spaghetti. I turned to a Jamie Oliver recipe that I have been using for the last 5 years or so, which tastes like an updated version of the Spaghetti Bolognaise that my mum made when I was growing up. As usual, it was really tasty and totally hit the spot.
Finding the beef on sale made this Spaghetti Bolognaise recipe, which serves 4, cost only $2.30 per serving.
Jamie Oliver’s recipe calls for 10 slices of pancetta or bacon which can get a bit expensive. To keep the smoky flavour and–more importantly–the tasty fat in the recipe, I cut up some prosciutto hock and used that instead. Basically the hock is the end piece of the prosciutto from which they can’t cut any more decent slices, so it can be found fairly cheap at Whole Foods deli counter for around $2.50 for a decent size chunk. Cutting the hock up worked great for this recipe and we used the rest later as a pizza topping. Here is the piece that I bought with some fresh cut rosemary from our garden. If you want to cut costs or fat further, you can just saute the rosemary with some plain olive oil and that works fine too.
I love trying to put as many veggies as possible in my spaghetti sauce. This time I found some carrots in my fridge and whizzed them up in the food processor and added them to the onion and garlic. In the past, I’ve put in mushrooms, zucchini, and bell peppers in the sauce too. The great thing is that not only are you upping your vegetable intake, but picky eaters and children don’t even know that these veggies are in the sauce when they eat it!
It seems to me that cooks are split on whether you should use really cheap wine when you cook, or whether you should only cook with something that you would drink. I’ve done both and I prefer cooking with cheap wine that I would drink, because what is better than cooking while enjoying a glass of wine? I found this Italian table red Rosso Pirovano on sale at Whole Foods for $7.99. It wasn’t the best wine but it served its purpose as both an ingredient and drinking partner for the night.
Instead of adding only a 14 oz can of whole tomatoes to this recipe, I added a 28 oz can. When you first put the sauce together it is quite liquidy, but once you put it in the oven, it thickens up and becomes really rich and meaty. Jamie Oliver suggests that you cook the sauce for 1.5 hours, but I would start checking the oven after 1 hour and take out the sauce when it is the consistency that you like.
The finished sauce served over some whole wheat spaghetti with some fresh shaved parmesan.
We ended up using some of the left over sauce as a pizza topping last night and the sauce perhaps tasted even better smothered with some mozzarella cheese and baked.
Mmmm. I love that Jamie Oliver recipe–I made it last night, minus the bacon since we were totally out!