One Wok, One Pot, One Pan: The ultimate ragu

(serves 6-8)

This is a party pleaser, especially if you can be bothered with fresh pappardelle! It's super simple and you can do other things whilst it cooks, but ideally, it should take 2-4 hours on the stove for the flavours to be absorbed in, so need to prepare early. Much patience and love is needed for this dish!

This dish was initially inspired my friend Michele, from whom i learnt some basics about italian cooking: keep it simple, be patient and work with the ingredient to bring out its flavour rather than overpowering. You can learn so much from watching someone else from a different background cook - definitely one of my favourite things to do!

Then whilst travelling, i met another Canadian-Italian, Jonathan and he showed me a few more tricks with this dish... including using your sense of smell to know when it's ready!

I think i'm still not quite there yet, but maybe one must truly be italian to get this one 100%...

Prep time: 45 min

Cooking Time: 3-5 hrs (on stove or in thermal/slow cooker)

Ingredients

500g lamb/pork mince

500g beef mince

300-400g passata

1 can tomatoes (or 3-4 chopped up tomatoes)

2 cloves garlic, thinly sliced

1 onion, very finely chopped

1/2 glass red wine

salt, pepper

olive oil

Method

1. In a pot, saute onions and garlic until soft

2. Add mince and cook over low heat, breaking up the mince and mixing in with the onion. Add some salt, pepper.

3. Once mince is seared and almost cooked, add wine and simmer until it has absorbed.

4. Add in passata and tomatoes and stir on heat for a minimum of 30 minutes until it starts to dry out a bit. At this point, it should smell quite tomato-ey.

5. If short on time, I put it into a thermal cooker for a couple of hours, then take out and stir over low heat for 30-45min. It is done when the meat dries out and has almost totally absorbed the tomato sauce (and smells meat-y). This is ideally achieved by keeping it on low heat for 2+ hours.

6. Serve with pasta!