my mama's bolognese sauce

So since this is supposed to be a personal blog, I can post about totally irrelevant things like what I made for dinner this week right?

Cooking is something that I actually really enjoy doing - it's the other stuff, like planning out groceries, having to spend time cooking before I can eat, and dirtying a lot of pots and pans for one person's worth of food that I dislike. Lately, though, I've been trying to do it more and more often - half because the list of recipes I want to try is building up (and I have my own kitchen to cook in now!) and half because it saves me so much money from eating out all the time.

One of the first recipes I tackled was a bolognese sauce over pasta that my mom has been making since I can remember. I have no idea where she got the original recipe from - for all I know, she made it up herself, but who knows?

There are a lot of bolognese sauce recipes (I've seen a version of it from just about every food blogger that I sporadically follow), but most are very complicated (involving dozens of ingredients and many stages of cooking). I like this one for the fact that most of the ingredients are probably already in your kitchen (or at least things that you would normally purchase anyway, so you don't have to buy a ton of ingredients, use a small amount for one recipe, and let the rest sit there) and that all of the labor is just chopping up the veggies. That's it. Into the pot they go to simmer for an hour or so until the sauce thickens, then serve over the pasta of your choice. I wish I had pictures (maybe the next time I make this I'll take some), but it's seriously so easy to make that you probably don't need the visual aids.

Pasta Bolognese
serves 4

Ingredients:

• 2 cloves garlic
• 1 medium onion, diced (I'm a big fan of sweet onions, but I'm sure white or yellow would work perfectly fine)
• 1 28oz can tomatoes (I use canned, whole, peeled tomatoes. I haven't tested this recipe with other varieties of canned tomatoes, but I don't doubt that they would work)
• 6-8 white button mushrooms, caps and stems sliced separately (feel free to increase or decrease the amount of mushrooms according to your preference)
• 1/2-2/3 pound ground beef (I've tried 85% lean and 95% lean, both taste great to me and I can't tell a difference)
• 8oz dry pasta of your choice (I recommend penne, but it's really up to you! Also, I generally go with about 2oz dry pasta per serving, but if you have big eaters or want leftovers, feel free to up this measurement.)
• Grated Parmesan cheese (for topping, as much or as little as you'd like)
• 1 tbsp olive oil (can sub other type of oil in a pinch)
• Salt, to taste

Instructions:

1. Over medium heat, put 1 tbsp olive oil in a medium saucepan (this is the pot you will be making the entire sauce in, so make sure it's deep enough to hold it all!)
2. Add garlic and sauté until fragrant, a minute or so. Add diced onions and sauté until tender, a few minutes. Season with salt to taste.
3. Add ground beef all at once, stir until it is completely brown and starts to crumble.
4. Pour in can of tomatoes, juice and all (if using fresh tomatoes, you'll need to add some liquid at this stage to make it saucy. I haven't tried this method so I can't guarantee anything, but perhaps chicken stock or even water would work.)
5. Add sliced mushroom stems and bring sauce to a simmer. Decrease to low heat and let simmer for 30 minutes, stirring every now and then.
6. Add sliced mushroom caps. Let simmer for another 30 minutes, or until the sauce is at your desired consistency - it should be quite thick and most of the liquid should be gone.
7. About 15-20 minutes before the sauce is done simmering, start cooking your pasta according to the package directions. Generally this will mean salting the water, waiting for it to come to a boil, adding the pasta and cooking for 9-10 minutes while stirring frequently to avoid sticking. Taste a few noodles as you approach the 8-9 minute mark - as soon as it reaches your desired firmness, remove the pot from the heat and drain the pasta immediately.
8. Toss the pasta with the sauce and serve topped with grated Parmesan.

Whee! Go forth and consume. I've made this sauce like three times in as many weeks. My MO these days is to make a giant batch of pasta sauce on Sunday night that lasts me all week, and then to boil two servings of pasta every night - one for that night's dinner, and the other to bring as lunch the next day. This sauce keeps and reheats really well - I've kept it in a Tupperware in the fridge and continued to eat it as leftovers for 4-5 days with no issues.

old film pt. 2 (September 2014)

Hey friends! Happy February. Been a while (like 10 days). As promised, here is the second roll of the film that I got developed a while back. All taken in September 2014 and pretty much all from our road trip out to South Dakota. These were on 35mm Fuji Superia 400 film (which was also expired - oops) and taken using a Canon AE-1 Program, and all unedited except for a bit of dust retouching. Hope the first month of 2015 has treated you all well!

Thanks for reading/viewing - I've got a lot of potential trips on the books for the next couple of months, so hopefully will have lots of photos to share here!

old film (July/August 2014)

One of my most frequently recurring challenges in Chicago is finding a place to get my film processed. I know how to develop and print B&W film, but I no longer have access to a darkroom in which to do so, and color film development is an entirely different beast that I never took the time to tame. My biggest lament regarding film is how long the turnaround time is - if I take a photo on day 1, I can actually see the photo on day 7 at the very earliest. And that's assuming I finish the rest of the roll that day and make it to my photo lab the same day (read: very unlikely). I'm seriously considering buying my own film scanner - for some reason I was under the impression that they're large and owned only by professionals/labs that process a lot of film, but it turns out you can get a desktop scanner for under $200. It wouldn't reduce the turnaround time by much, but at least I wouldn't be paying $14 a roll for development and scanning (hell, it'd pay for itself after 10-20 rolls). Until then, though, thankfully my old photo lab opened a new location near-ish to my apartment (though most others have closed down within the year so I don't have very high hopes despite that I really hope they stick around) so I can finally see and show you all film photos I took literally six months ago, everywhere from Chicago to the Badlands of South Dakota. This is roll one of two; photos are in chronological order, spanning July and August 2014, all taken on 35mm Fuji 400H film using a Canon AE-1 Program. Almost all are SOOC (unedited) except for one or two on which I did a little dust retouching and nothing else. Hope you enjoy!

Stay tuned for film-photo-dump part 2 - I've got a whole roll of film from September 2014, mainly snaps from our road trip to South Dakota!

l'eau

Finally, some new work! It's been raining for three days straight now and it was 40 degrees out the day we took these. Of course we chose the coldest day of our entire time in Houston to get out the hose and take some photos involving water/wet hair/wet everything. Of course, Jialing was a trooper and totally pulled through on these. IT'S FOR ART.

Forgot to get out my film camera for this shoot, which I'm regretting now, but these turned out okay I think. A little different from my previous work, but that's kind of the MO these days. Thanks for viewing!

Houston in iPhone photos

One of my good friends, Jialing (ha, let's be real - more like one of my only friends left in Chicago), is from Houston, and this holiday season she invited me to stay with her at her family's place there. As is my custom, I brought way more cameras with me than I could possibly actually use at once, and ended up using my iPhone for most trips anyway because every outing was another chapter in the I Am Too Weak to Carry Around My DSLR saga. Such is life, but the best camera is the one you have with you (though Jialing and I did do a quick shoot together while we were there - during which I did use my DSLR! Post on that to come in the next few days, with images from the shoot). Below are snaps of Houston from my iPhone!

the new year

For a number of years, I didn't believe in making New Year's Resolutions. Whether this was because I felt like I should be improving myself constantly/regardless of the time of year or because I was just lazy is anyone's guess, though I reserve the right to believe it was the former.

This year, though, I did manage to start early on what would normally be one of my resolutions. One of my goals for quite a while has been to improve my diet and exercise more often, which I've done on and off for years but haven't been able to sustain for long periods of time. I've been a runner for years and a swimmer in a past life, but I recently added biking to the cardio rotation and have been watching what I eat more carefully and even lost some weight to boot. I even finished a marathon (the Chicago Marathon!) in October - woo! There's still plenty of legwork left to be done, but starting the New Year already knee-deep in my goals feels good.

The big, overarching resolution for this year is to MAKE STUFF. This sounds vague. Let me explain. It actually originated from a Cracked article that I read this year, pointing out that it's very easy to criticize others' work while not creating any of your own. Most of us spend the vast majority of our time consuming things that others made: watching TV, browsing websites, etc. But only creating our own things makes us more valuable as people. For me, only being creative, making art, taking photos, and the like give me a reason for existence. This is what I'm devoting myself to this year. No more excuses. Every weekend can be spent outdoors taking pictures, going to the studio to paint, going through my insane backlog of photographs that I haven't edited or posted. These are things that mean a lot to me and they deserve more time than I've been spending on them.

Oh also, I definitely plan to keep up and further the progress I've already made in eating better/working out more. I replaced my running shoes recently - put over 450 miles on the last pair, and I'm excited to run even more this year than I did last. I absolutely plan to run at least one more marathon in 2015, if not two - I'll be running New York for sure, and Chicago for a second time if I manage to make it through the lottery again!

A quote from Iain Thomas' wonderful I Wrote This for You blog seems appropriate here:

"As you fell, you begged the air for just a little more time, for a second chance to do all the things you'd always meant to do.

So here it is.

You'll remember nothing of what happened.

You'll feel exactly the same.

You'll find yourself back in front of the computer, reading the same post on the same blog that started it all so many years ago.

And only the words in this post have changed.

And this is a little more time.

And this is your second chance.

And it starts: Now."

Happy 2015, everyone - I hope you all make yourselves proud this year.