The Weekender: Pasta with rich meat sauce recipe

You've probably had a rather busy week, so how about having some 'you time', a glass of something, and cooking.`The Weekender'

Introducing 'The Weekender'

The idea behind ‘The Weekender’ is simple. Each Saturday we pick a recipe from our database and not only cook it, but cost it too. We explore its history, and its ingredients, as well as getting some expert advice.

We hope that you’ll be inspired to make it, and if you do, take a snap and post it on our Facebook wall and tell us if you enjoyed it, or even things you did different. In short it’s a cook-a-long with us here at lovefood.com

The recipe

The Weekender for 9th/10th of June is Pasta with rich meat sauce by Romilla Arber. Romilla is a busy mum of four children who in 2008 established The Food Education Trust, to promote the benefits of a balanced home cooked diet.

The shopping

Get yourself round your local butchers on the way to pick up milk and the papers. If you’re heading to the supermarket, we’ve costed the dish at just over a tenner for a family of four (this week we picked ASDA), with plenty leftover.

ASDA
So £7.42 for beef skirt
27p for the onion
£1.32 for the wine (550ml leftover) **based on a £5-ish bottle
1 penny for the tomato puree
62p for the chopped tomatoes (value range)
£1 for the pasta
Less than a penny for the paprika
£2 for the parmesan (plenty leftover)
Total = £12.64

Here's a handy shopping list to print out, or to save to your phone if you're tech savvy.

Show me a bit of skirt

Romilla’s recipe features skirt or flank steak - a wonderful cut of meat, cheap and with plenty of flavour. It has what can only be described as a grain texture running through it, like a piece of fine timber. Skirt is often used in Cornish pasties, as well as other types of pies.

John Mettrick at award winning Mettrick’s butchers in Glossop, Derbyshire tells me "there are actually three different types of skirt or flank steak; rump skirt, heart skirt and flank skirts.” He goes on, “the heart skirt, marketed as hanger steaks, hangs between the heart and the liver. The flank skirts are muscles from the belly, while rump skirt sits over part of the thick end of fillet. Finally the diaphragm skirt is on the inside of the rib cage and is very dark however don’t be put off by this; it indicates that the meat is rich and flavourful.” John gives us one final piece of advice: “The grain is separated by white fat that disappears in cooking, adding flavour so try to cut across the grain when dicing”.

The pasta

Try and find the pappardelle pasta the recipe calls for. This wide pasta is traditionally paired with rich meaty stews and sauces featuring beef, duck or wild boar. The slightly rough texture on the ribbons takes up the sauce more easily than thinner pastas like linguini and spaghetti. Romilla also gives a recipe to make your own.

Cooking it

A dish like this is all about long slow cooking - it’s very forgiving. So if you get side tracked by the kids or the football goes to extra time, it won’t really matter for the sauce. If you get all the shopping done in the morning, and the dish prepped and in the oven by 4pm, you’ll have the most amazing dinner at 7pm I’m sure.

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