Bolognese sauce

 We've just got a juicer - or rather the other half has. It's supposed to aid weight loss as you are meant to chew up all sorts of vegetable matter in it to make juice.

It's certainly high-powered and cleverly designed. It has twin blades and seems to be able to chew up anything into a gritty sort of juice. Unfortunately some of the fresh vegetables you can juice leave a rather bitter taste. That may well aid weight loss as it's a real appetite killer.

So it occurred to me I could use it to make a proper Bolognese sauce to go with my pasta. That is a sauce that  feels like it's been made with tomatoes.

If you remember the story of my pasta sauce, I started by trying to make it like Bolognese. I chopped a range of vegetables - mainly red cabbage and leek - as finely as possible, sometimes adding Golden Delicious apple or banana for a sweet and sour effect.

To do this you have to fry the vegetables before the fish or separately from the mince.

So I've ended up with a delicious pasta sauce containing a variety of vegetable, fruit and fish together with soy sauce. It is delicious but some complain it's a little salty. And it's not Bolognese as the vegetables and fruit are stir fried and not pulped.

So for my first effort with the juicer I didn't use a base oil. I juiced red cabbage, leek, shallot and white cabbage and banana, put it in the pan and added soy sauce and tuna. It was disgusting and there was too much of it. The juicing of vegetables leaves a very bitter and unpalatable taste.

I tried again and this time I fried some sardines first and added the soy sauce first. Then I added the vegetable juice. That tasted a lot better and looked like Bolognese sauce also.

It's still nothing like a substitute sauce yet and I could not serve it to guests and pretend it was Bolognese. Next time I will try apple instead of banana.

That's if there is a next time as this really is not as tasty as what I was doing before with stir fry.

RAS

Trying tomato

Sometime ago I reported eating out in an Italian restaurant and having to eat a dish packed with tomato and herbs. The dish seemed to be fine because it was fish, rather than meat.

I've now had the same experience again. We found a reasonably-priced Italian restaurant with a good variety of choices. The dish I chose was linguine and king prawn. I didn't expect it to have quite so much tomato in it - that wasn't advertised. But it was delicious, really tasty. And there have been absolutely no side-effects, zero side-effects. I did leave most of the chunks of tomato - but there was plenty in the pasta sauce also.

It helped no doubt  I took a montelukast that day and also helped I was eating a sea-food meal. But after a Christmas season which was quite difficult - and that may have been down to drinking white wine - it's fun to enjoy a meal with strong tastes and suffer absolutely no after-effects.

Now, if I remember right, my last list suggested tomato was low in salicylate - not high and not zero. But I've avoided it as I've avoided onion (see a current discussion on this site), because it seemed strongly implicated when problems first started. I vividly remember that meal of celery and cherry tomato when I was on a near-starvation diet and how my mouth just swelled up. The allergy consultant was also impressed by that story.

And Italian food was strongly linked to my initial symptoms. My body could not handle spaghetti bolognese and pizza. So should I try to introduce more tomato into my diet?

RAS

Fish pasta sauce

 I promised to list all the recipes I've put together and then discovered I had never posted some of them.

So here is a simple and quick fish-based pasta sauce:

start cooking your pasta

• chop white cabbage and leek;
• stir fry in saucepan until white cabbage starts to brown;
•  add tin of fish - sardines or mackerel are best but tuna is manageable;
• add parsley;
  
• stir until it simmers;
• add milk, also yoghurt, cream or cheese if you wish;
• simmer and stir until pasta is ready.

Delicious!


RAS