When'sa your Homemade Ragu Day?

"The best cooking is where you get to do everything for yourself" says the young man "with no 'rental interference". Taking them at their word I give them a copy of Family Cooking and set them off to cook Bolognaise. They need to plan, shop, prep and cook this for Tuesday night. What follows is their post

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A mixed-weather Monday morning heralds a trip to Totnes to collect the following items;

• 1 carrot
• 2 celery stalks
• Milk (In a ragu? Crazy stuff...)

Note - Eat home-made Ragu, that hasn't been sold to you by that shady looking Italian in the corner there...

My chauffeured trolley ride around the Supermarket proved that Morrisons was worryingly easy to navigate around, compared to the usual labyrinth that some call 'Sommerfield'. The items were collected and were 'neatly' stowed in the boot.
Totnes high street could be aptly described as a confusing destination for shoppers, partly because of the sheer amount of places to shop for food! 500g of minced beef, easy enough right? We were mistaken...

It turns out that there are 3 different butchers on Totnes high street, each with their own share of customers.We opted for Luscombe (at the top of the high street) , which rather conveniently had just finished a laborious mincing session!
'Country Cheese' also satisfied my cheesy disposition with Keen's cheddar from Sommerset. The staff were very helpful and eager to please, worth a try!

We then returned to the house and started assembling our ingredients for the task ahead. Three Bolognaise-related arguments and three quarters of an hours later, we had assembled our ragu. It took two hours to cook it down, but in our opinion it could have done with another half an hour with the lid off, just to reduce the wateriness.
Apparently, Ragu should always be cooked twice (which goes against all I have previously been told about food) After a rewarding Surf-fest, we re-heated it and added it to our fussili pasta (spaghetti just doesn't hold the sauce) which went perfectly with a choice of Parmazan, the new cheddar, or pecarino!

The recipe, nicked from 'The River Cottage Family Cookbook' was a huge success, if not for the fact that anything not containing sand was considered perfect. However, we do believe that there might have been too many liquids in the mixture and that the recipe could be tweaked a bit to thicken the sauce, but that's just our slightly substandard cooking skills , enjoy!