What's for Dinner

'Penne Bolognese.' The ingredients were,

1.5 Slender sausages
1 Clove garlic
3.5 Onions
5 Celery stalks
6 Mushrooms
3 Dabs of tomato paste
2 Tins Tomatoes, in juice
1 Box of diced tomato pieces
1 Vine tomato, fresh
1 kg? of Ground beef
1 Bay leaf
Enough hot water with beef bouillon powder to rinse out the tomato receptacles
Dried basil and oregano and rosemary, ground pepper, salt, and sweet paprika
1 kg of penne
N.B.: We only needed 0.5 kg.

As I had feared, after an experience cooking a bacon-laden formal bolognese sauce recipe years ago, the porky sausage flavour 'outshouted' the beef. (Much like the fragrance of a pig farm overwhelms the ambient countryside, albeit far more agreeably.) It was not bad, although I think that beef that tastes like pork has a Frankenstein's-monster-like quality; the meaty flavour of the sausages was pleasingly savoury and tempting. In fact, if I had just made lentil soup or made a fried meal of the sausages, onions and mushrooms, it would have done them justice.

But, as far as taste went, the tomatoes turned into a dominant paradox. Though I theoretically believe in making the frying fat from the beginning of a recipe absorb and carry the flavour, and I mixed the tomatoes and other ingredients well, they were watery-tasting tomatoes. I even let the bottom of the onions, garlic, celery, sausage and ground meat burn, thereby having caramelization and the Maillard reaction increase the flavour, and it made no apparent difference. The perfidious tomatoes — again, having little flavour in themselves — dominated everything except their own wateriness.

So my experiments with bolognese sauce — after a lengthy and frustrating history of watery-tasting sauces — are not yet completed.