Cooking Homemade Bolognese!

As some of you can tell, I’ve gotten a lot more into cooking recently! After our 10 day trip to Italy Nate and I decided to cook an authentic Bolognese sauce to serve with the pici pasta we brought back from Rome. Pici pasta is my new favorite pasta – it is a thicker noodle that really absorbs the sauce it’s tossed with – and it’s got a great texture and is of course extremely filling! Bolognese varies depending on the recipe, but I use my mom’s, which features chunks of mortadella, pancetta, ground pork, ground beef, carrots, celery, fresh tomatoes, and a white wine-chicken broth base (see below for the entire recipe). We started out sautéing the veggies and pancetta:

Then you add in the pork and beef and allow them to brown a bit:

 Then you add in the white wine, broth, and tomatoes and it simmers for a while:

 It cooks for about an hour and a half, but about 30 minutes before you’re ready to serve it you start the pici pasta, which takes a little over 20 minutes to cook:

 You definitely want to toss the pici with the pasta, not just serve it on top of the pasta – like I said before it does an amazing job of soaking up all the flavors in the sauce so make sure you toss it! We topped ours off with parmesan cheese and truffle oil that we brought back with us from Tuscany. Needless to say, it was an AMAZING dish!

PS: I recommend serving it with a wine from the Chianti region…we had Rosso di Montalcino (I would have sprung for a Brunello if not for the price tag… yum!)

The recipe for the Bolognese is in the link below - it's from Food & Wine magazine:

http://www.foodandwine.com/recipes/spaghetti-with-bolognese-sauce