Lady Lunchalot

Recently, O and I were treated to a bowl of Signor Valvasori’s outstanding bolognese (boh-lonn-yezz-eh for the purists) which started me thinking about how absolutely EVERYONE has a recipe for spag bol (for the not-so-purists). Even blokes who can’t cook anything other than toast, or students in share houses who are fresh from the nest and consider two minute noodles to be haute cuisine.

My mother has the best bolognese recipe I’ve ever tasted, and I’ve never been able to copy it exactly. I don’t know why - I make mine exactly the same as she does - but it never has the same degree of texture or flavour that it did when I was a kid. Nostalgia does funny things to taste buds.

So the Italian Signor got me thinking about how a bolognese recipe is a true signature dish - everyone has one, and everyone does it a little differently. My bolognese will always contain a diced carrot or two, bay leaves, and a hearty splash of whatever red I have at hand. I also use a sacrilegious blob of Vegemite (a trick I picked up from Mum) and a drizzle of Worcestershire sauce to give it some depth in a very un-Italian way. Often my bolognese will contain a chunk of finely chopped speck or some other kind of cured piggy. And it will always be served with Barilla No 7 and lots of cheese, preferably a good parmesan.

Il Signor uses a mixture of minced meats (he told me but I won’t give away his secrets here).

I find that the best bologneses take a long time, enough for the tomatoey flavours to blend with the meat in a long slow seduction. However bolognese is also the staple of the harassed mum, who rushes home from work and is able to produce a tasty crowd pleasing family favourite in a little under 30 minutes.

Spag bol is nothing if not versatile.

And the best part about everyone’s favourite comfort food is that the leftover sauce can be eaten on toast for brekkie the next day. There was always tension in our house the morning after spaghetti bolognese when I was growing up, as the early bird (or the oldest brother) usually got to the bowl of leftover sauce first.

What’s your bolognese secret?

I just discovered some photos in my phone taken a few weeks ago at SOS, the new Italian seafood restaurant in Melbourne Central that’s being touted as Melbourne’s new must-dine vegaquarian venue.

SOS is the new star in the Paul Mathis constellation, twinkling up there with his past successes like Taxi, Chocolate Buddha, Blue Train, Soulmama and the after-work drinks staple, Transport. The entire menu at SOS is made from vegetarian dishes or sustainably-produced seafood. Regular readers will know my views on vegetarianism. It’s not often that a veg dish can hold my attention for longer than a couple of mouthfuls. So it was lucky that I didn’t know a thing about SOS when Zarina suggested it as I probably would have been turned off by the idea of a meatless meal.

However there was nothing about these dishes that bored me. I was STARVING when I arrived at SOS for lunch with Zarina and Amelia, partly because I skipped breakfast that day, and partly because I worked up an appetite just trying to find the place. The entrance to SOS looks kind of like the doorway into the Tardis. It’s big, heavy, gold and makes the place look very unwelcoming. And the blowfly-esque logo (is it a moth? A cicada?) made me wonder if I had found the right place or whether I was about to walk into a room full of teenage boys playing Time Crisis.

But the entry and the logo are my only criticisms. The food and service was superb, and our seat overlooking the state library lawns on a perfect spring day made me wistful for my uni years (though with the mains sitting at around the $28 mark, I certainly wouldn’t have been eating at SOS if I were still a student). We were offered some complimentary mini-crostinis to get the ball rolling, which was a lovely way to welcome us to the restaurant and wiped away my memories of the imposing entry.

Thankfully Zarina and Amelia are lunchalot aficionados, so indulged me when I wanted to take pics of the dishes as they arrived.

Ravioli ripieni di porcini e timo serviti con salsa di mirtilli e burro
Hand made ravioli pasta filled with fresh porcini and thyme served with butter and Tasmanian blueberries. This is the only item from a few weeks ago which is still on the menu, and I can’t remember the details of the other dishes we ate!

Taglierini with prawns

Cute little crostini with my favourite Italian phrase, mozzarella di buffala!

SOS
Level 3, Melbourne Central
211 La Trobe Street, Melbourne

I like to go long and slow with my lasagne sauce.

So far I have chopped the heads of a few Roma tomatoes and am popping them in my big cast-iron pot with some whole cloves of garlic, red wine, onions, bay leaf, and an assortment of other herbs. This will be roasted until everything goes mushy - about an hour or so.

There’s nothing like a slow-cooked bolognese…

Saturday night was looming. Kathryn and Tim were coming over, and, inspired by this month’s issue of Gourmet Traveller, I was in an Italian mood. O finished up his job on Friday, so it was a great cause for celebration.

This occasion called for a timpano.

If you’re musically inclined, you’ve probably heard of a timpani. They are those big kettle drums you see in orchestra pits that look like huge bowls with skins stretched over the top. A timpano is the culinary version of one of these drums - it’s a huge big bowl of pastry filled with pasta, meatballs, salami, olives, and any other delicious Italian thing you can think of. This dish caused a bit of a culinary stir in the mid 90s after it was the centrepiece of the foodie movie Big Night.

It takes the best part of the day to prepare, so this is a dish that is worthy of a drum roll.

Timpano is also a Maltese dish (though in Maltese it’s spelled “timpana” and is not quite so elaborate as the Italian version), so it felt good to cook something with ties to my own heritage.

My day started with a trip back to the Mediterranean Wholesalers in Brunswick, where I stocked up on passata, olives, mozzarella, salami, and other items that make life worthwhile. I wanted a wide variety of pasta to choose from, as the texture of the pasta in timpano is very important. You don’t want pasta that is too big or small, as it will squish down under the weight of all the other ingredients and become too dense. You can use any type of cylindrical pasta for timpano: bucatini, rigatoni, penne, even maybe big macaroni. I chose a ridged diagonal penne where you could actually see the fold in the pasta rather than having one smooth tube.

The components of my timpano were as follows:
1. Bolognese sauce (not too runny)
2. Bechamel sauce
3. Pasta
4. Pastry for the shell
5. Polpette (little walnut-sized meatballs… possibly the cutest-sounding word in the Italian language)
6. Hard boiled eggs
7. Other ingredients like olives, hunks of mozzarella, salami, capers, peas etc

As you can see, it’s a pretty time-consuming dish to prepare. I think I used every pot in my kitchen twice.

You can find an excellent detailed recipe from Gourmet Traveller, May 2006, but basically you make the pastry first and chill it in the fridge until everything else is done. Then get your bolognese going. While that is simmering and reducing, hard boil your eggs. Then make your meatballs and pan fry them until brown. Next, make a big pot of bechamel sauce. Mix the pasta with half the bechamel and the bolognese. Roll out your pastry and fit to a huge dish (I used my biggest springform pan - I highly recommend this strategy). Make sure there is lots of pastry overhanging on the sides. Place the pasta mixture in the bottom, then layer the other ingredients, including a drizzle of passata here and there. Work in the rest of the bolognese and bechamel. Make sure you include some generous chunks of mozzarella here and there. Next time I will also beat a few eggs together and drizzle some raw egg through it too.

Fold the overhanging pastry over the top and bake for a couple of hours.

Now, the next step is VERY important.

If you make your timpano in a springform pan, don’t be tempted to tip it upside down as is traditionally done when it is baked in a pot. A timpano full of this many ingredients is pretty heavy, and as it is quite exciting to see a dish like this after working on it for several hours, it is very easy to get carried away and accidentally drop it on the kitchen floor in front of your dinner guests.

Everybody was looking at me as though my head were about to explode.

But I honestly believe the joy is in the cooking, so while I was a little disappointed that I didn’t get to slice through it and see a cross section of Italian garlic-laced goodness, I wasn’t too upset. We resurrected most of it and ate it anyway. It tasted great (though it lost a little something in the presentation). Luckily I was able to get a photo of it before I dropped it.

When I was a kid, my brother’s friend dropped a plate of mum’s spaghetti all over the floor. For years afterwards we had a family joke about “spaghetti alla floor”. So I guess it’s kind of fitting that such a traditional dish should end up on the floor too.

If you’re into Italian food and plenty of it, you’re stepping through the gates of paradise the moment you enter Brunswick’s Mediterranean Wholesaler.

This place is a catalogue for the confirmed Italophile, and is a nostalgic step back into the smells of nonna’s kitchen. Any place that has an entire aisle dedicated to pasta is alright by me.

O and I made the pilgrimage to MW on the weekend to stock up on some supplies. I tend to go a little nuts when I visit this supermarket, so it was a good thing he was there to rein me in. We did the obligatory bulk purchase of all the staples in my kitchen: cartons of tinned tomatoes, olive oil, pasta, and we threw in a few goodies for fun. I found some mozzarella di buffala which promptly became a couple of calzones for dinner on Sunday night (with salami, anchovies, olives, garlic, various herbs) . I had a little trouble with the dough and it didn’t rise the way I wanted it to. I think the kitchen was a little too cold for the yeast (bloody Melbourne), so I took the dough into the living room to rise next to the heater for a while.

My pizza stone has been baptised now - one of my calzones had a Vesuvial eruption of cheese, leaving a burnt stain across the surface. O loves it. He gave me that pizza stone for Christmas, and he likes that it looks a little more worn (like most of the things in my kitchen).

As a Mediterranean Wholesaler virgin, O was quite gobsmacked at the range of items the supermarket carried. He was particularly impressed with the pasticceria, so we ordered a tray of biscuits that tasted so much like my dearly departed nanna’s that I wanted to hang her rosary beads back on my kitchen door. The biscuits didn’t last long. Once we had loaded all the food in the car there was a frenzy of glace cherries, almond paste and chocolate buds and it was all over before you could say “mangi!”.

I always look upon the world a little more softly when my pantry is full of pasta.