Food for thought Friday

I am a total fashion and beauty junkie, there's no denying it, but I also love cooking. There's something about creating a meal from scratch, it tastes so much better to me than pre-cooked packaged food. Plus it's always good to know what's going into your meals. A couple weeks ago, or days, not entirely sure, I posted about my healthy eating day and someone suggested I post some recipes so thought I'd let you in on my dinner for last night :). I would do 'what I ate today' food posts quite often, but I don't know if that's really what people want to read when they find my blog and also I don't tend to eat lunch that much as it's not my thing so would pretty much just be dinner! Either way, I hope you like my recipe, which was found online and tweaked a bit.


The recipe: Homemade bolognese!

(okay I made this for just me, but with a little more pasta it would definitely do two as I didn't finish it)

Ingredients:
1 tbsp olive oil
250g extra lean beef mince
1 carrot
2 large cloves of garlic
1 1/2 teaspoons basil
2 teaspoons mixed herbs
1 18.7cl bottle red wine
1 onion, cut up into chunks
100g passata
200g tinned chopped tomatoes
200g tagliatelle

(optional - garlic bread and parmesan)

Method:
1. Fry the olive oil in a large frying pan, then add the crushed garlic and onion and fry off until softened. Add the mince and cook through until brown. (this is how it looks at this point)

2. Add the red wine and leave to boil, stirring occasionally until it's reduced in volume by about two thirds. Then add the carrots, chopped tomatoes, basil and mixed herbs and stir all in together. Cover and leave to simmer on a low heat for about 10 minutes (it said an hour and a half online, mine would have been burnt to a crisp by then!)

This is before covering :)

3. Turn off the heat to the mince and cook the pasta according to packet instructions. Then add the pasta to the mince mixture and stir to coat. This is where I added the passata, just because there wasn't really any sauce at all. I'd recommend tasting the sauce before you serve as mine could have done with a little more herbs. 

And voila! I'm sure it'd taste just as nice with spaghetti, I just fancied a change :). 

Let me know if any of you do try this and what you think, and if there's anything else you would like to see me cook (for a change from the beauty and fashion) then leave me a comment and I'll be sure to try it out!