It came... From the kitchen cupboards! Part 1

So, the Curator and I have had a week-anna-bit to get back into the swing of cooking things Not From Boxes, and it's gone fairly well!

My father, God love him, was an excellent cook, and in particular a master of on-the-fly cookery. He didn't teach me a blessed thing about cooking, because he couldn't stand people in his kitchen, but I think I inherited his facility for pulling together something tasty out of random bits -- what my former housemate Andrew lovingly, if obnoxiously, used to call "shit in a pan".

That's come in handy, as has the Curator's love of googling recipes. Particularly because we had an awful lot of... #ArchivedIngredients, let's put it that way. Using them up is a bit of a priority. Starting with:

Spaghetti Bolognese/Lasagne (with apologies to the entire population of Italy up front)

We started by washing and dicing 3 celery stalks (or so) and 3 small carrots, and peeling and dicing a fairly large white onion (classic soffritto), like so:

Soffritto, before

By the way, the silver bowl is part of Julia, our Instant Pot, because we're not just middle-class, we're middle-class hipsters. Instant Pots are electric pressure cooker/multi-function cookery devices that techy types are (often worryingly) fond of, and Julia was a (self-picked) wedding present. Hard recommend, especially if you're looking to knock time off slow-cooking, but obviously you can do this in a regular pot.

So, with everything diced, we added a chunk of butter and glug of olive oil to Julia, and hit the saute button. After a few minutes, we got the following:

Soffritto, after: thanks, Julia!

We then repeated the saute process with 250g of beef mince. Once that was nice and brown, we deglazed Julia with sherry, then added a can of tomato puree (BB 5 years ago) and sauted. Then back in with the soffritto, half of a 1L TetraPak of tomato passata (BB 3 years ago, I think), and a fistful of Italian herbs from the Ziploc bag we store the busted container in (BB... I don't even know. Definitely not now.) Then on with Julia's lid, for 3 minutes at high pressure. (If you're doing this in a normal pot, simmer to taste.) After a taste, we tinkered a bit (I remember lemon juice and a shake of Worcester sauce):

End result!

This made WAY more sauce than 2 people could eat in one sitting. The remainder got combined with some lasagne sheets, some bechamel, and 150g of cheddar (because we'd run out of parmesan), and whacked in the oven.

Apparently, we cook when we're bored

That was another dinner, and a lunch, for both of us. What's portion control?