Spaghetti Bolognese
Spaghetti Bolognese

On Wednesday afternoon I make spaghetti bolognese, and learn that the only possible way of preventing oneself from tearing up when working with onions, is to wear glasses and not gloves — as I had previously (and always) believed.

I use a recipe from Jamie Oliver’s website which is rated 4.8 stars and measures as “not too tricky” on their internal culinary complexity scale. It’s entitled Deliciously Easy Spaghetti Bolognese, and gets me all sorts of excited — insofar as the delicious seems to pertain to the bolognese, but grammatically speaking, relates to the simplicity part of the recipe instead.

The reason for all the fuss and the bolognese being a big deal is because I’m actually a vegetarian. I rarely eat meat and other animal-based gastronomic varietals, but suffer with some sort of anaemia, and so have supplements and spaghetti when the time is right — rather than going down the route of having an iron transfusion every now and then, which is in my opinion not only tiresome but also quite unreasonably dramatic.

I’d prefer not to be prodded and pricked with needles when I can suspend my ethics and have a delightful dish instead.

The recipe involves three hours of my time and carrots, onions, plummed tomatoes, rosemary, bay leaves, an “ethically butchered” mince from Angus, and a pair of sunglasses I bought for 3 Euros in Paris last year — to assist with the onion tear side of things (in case you forgot that earlier part).

I work while the sauce is simmering, and then clear my laptop away when the dish is done, and sit with the windows wide open and the sun shining through them, onto me and my spaghetti. It’s perfectly delicious and leaves light red oil marks all over the place, and makes me think of just the same kind I used to have at Giovanni’s in Illovo when I was growing up. The waiters would bring the spaghetti through to the tables on the saucepans in which they’d been prepared, and lay them on top of wooden circular boards intended to prevent the going-up-in-flames of both the tablecloth and restaurant, simultaneously.

We are in another place and at another time, but the flavours and rich and thick, and it’s a pity not to be able to share it with anyone — but at the same time, it isn’t.
['Talya Galasko']
['Short Story', 'Diary', 'Lockdown', 'Memories', 'Youth']