The season of the mince

 I've got very uninspired about meat week lately. It used to be, when I first started doing my four-week cooking rotation, that I'd be desperate to get to meat week, and constantly irritated earlier in the cycle that I couldn't just add meat. But now a lot of meat doesn't really seem all that intriguing, cooking-wise. Which seems like a good Cop26 kind of situation. Unfortunately, I do really still like mince dishes - meatballs and sausage type of things, and when they roll around I do like that part. It's just if you schedule a full week of them, it's a bit much. 

I'll spare you pasta sauce #1, white ragu with aubergine and sage (except the aubergine had gone off, dagnabbit, so it was much more basic). Then there was spicy beef pancakes from Simply.

Nice idea - and a quick spiced mince is fine. The pancakes though...

It's not a good sign, when you can see frying pan through a lot of your pancake.

Yep. More of an omelette really. With dill and spicy beef, not too shabby. 

I added more flour for the second batch. Better.

Look, if you're expecting me to be able to do presentation, you really have paid no attention since this blog started. 

Anyway. Better tonight, despite being extremely exhausted - another pasta sauce, involving porcini, leeks and delicious Italian sausage. Advantages: cooks by itself pretty much when you're 3/4 dead of Teams meetings. Disadvantages: you need to soak your dried porcini beforehand and you may cry when you read that bit of the recipe. 

1. Take about 25g of dried porcini and SOAK THEM FOR 20 minutes while you sit on the sofa recovering from your day. 

 

2. Slice a whole leek, and start to fry it off. Strip the innards out of some Nice Sausages (mine were Italian with fennel seeds, swank). Add them to the leek and cook them all together till nothing is raw. 

 

3. Then add the soaked porcini. Chop a couple of tomatoes and add them too. Add some salt, add some grated nutmeg. (Weeny nutmeg grater courtesy of Liz. Thank you x)

4. Add a small glass of white wine, a splosh of the porcini soaking liquid if you didn't already drain it (I didn't, mainly through lethargy), and give the sauce 20 minutes brisk simmering, probably with the lid on.

Meanwhile, do pasta. 

I cannot comment on any allegations that I accidentally bought big mushrooms for this on the basis of the title alone, while also making sure I had dried porcini. They mixed in okay. 

It's been an interesting week, as it's panel - the culmination of each 4 months of my work. Our fifth awards panel of the pandemic (and our last in-person one was in early March 2020, when we were already elbow-bumping nervously but hadn't got into the mindset of lockdown at all - so effectively two full panel years of covidness, oof). This one felt a lot more normal, in terms of caseload and services reopening. On the other hand, I had my first absolutely definite covid exposure as a result of doing a site assessment visit (we're all fine, nobody caught it on the day), it really doesn't feel all that post-pandemic. 

As of next week, I'm officially hybrid working, though I've been doing it a fair while in effect. Isn't transition time confusing? And don't we all wish the direction of travel was definitely all one way? 

It's 600 days come Saturday. Join us for some quiiiiiite strong Confined Cocktails at 7pm GMT if you can.