Sunday's Cooking

Yesterday I roasted the Chinese BBQ pork I started on Saturday. We didn't eat this in a meal, but our little test drive indicates that it's damn good. :-) I'll be cooking with some of the pork this week, the rest went in the freezer.

For dinner I made a big batch of ragu (following the Jamie Oliver recipe from the NYT a couple years ago) using the three pound london broil from our cow. This doubled recipe turned out to be too much for my poor pressure cooker, so I had to remove some of the vegetables and a bit of liquid (I simmered these in a separate covered pan) to get things less than 3/4 filled. That still was overly filled, so it took forever to get up to pressure, but in the end the sauce turned out well. In addition to last night's meal, we now have two quarts of sauce in the freezer and a further quart in the fridge for later in the week.

We ate the pasta over home-made tagliatelle. Our food processor is broken, so I couldn't use that to mix the pasta dough. For some reason I used the "break the eggs into a mound of flour" technique instead of being sensible and mixing everything in a bowl. I ought to know better than that. After much cursing, I finally ended up with some properly elastic pasta dough which rolled out nicely. Cutting the dough was no problem, but I was stupidly parsimonious with the flour, so getting the noodles separated turned out to be a massive pain in the ass.

Between the overly full pressure cooker, the stupid dough mixing, and the sticky noodles, I had one of those evenings in the kitchen. Luckily the food all turned out really well... that, in the end, is the most important thing.