Linguine Bolognese

Since I JUST realized that one of the groceries in this neighborhood sells frozen meats, I decided it was time to finally buy some and cook something real. By real, I mean not pasta with ready-made bacon, fried rice, scrambled eggs, corned beef, or instant noodles. As I've mentioned a few times before, it's hard to get meat and fish in this immediate area, and equally difficult to get fresh meat and fish anywhere else on this island. Yeah, you'd think it'd be so easy to get fresh fish here, but it seems like it typically goes to people who own restaurants and such. You also have to get up super early on a Saturday morning to get the freshest fish.

Anyways, since many of my friends have gotten the frozen ground beef from this little convenience store near campus, I figured it was safe enough and that I'd make bolognese sauce. Since I've never seen celery on this island, I couldn't incorporate a mirepoix (a term I learned from Gabe, who knows far more culinary vocabulary than I do). So I used my own version and used frozen peas and carrots instead, and of course with fresh onions. After cooking the veggies and ground beef, I added some leftover canned diced tomatoes and a 28oz can of Hunt's mushroom tomato sauce. Using ready-made tomato sauce saved a lot of propane. If that wasn't an issue here, then I would have used fresh or canned tomatoes. I then added maybe about a 3/4 cup of evaporated milk. Again, there's no fresh milk here. Only shelf milk, evaporated milk, condensed milk, etc.

It turned out to be pretty good and close enough to my mom's bolognese sauce. She Filipinoes it up a bit by adding diced Vienna beef hot dogs. Not to be confused with Vienna sausages. Oh, and in case you're wondering if my mom and I add sugar to our spaghetti sauce like how most Filipinos do, then yes, we do, with one caveat. The sugar is purely for balance and to enhance the tomatoes, rather than to actually make the sauce sweet. Sweet spaghetti is still a strange concept to me.

The sauce turned out pretty good. It definitely not ambitious or even worthy of note, but for me, it's pretty exciting to find some protein other than eggs that I can cook on this island. But if only I could find some parmigiano reggiano on this island.