Oh my! This sauce is out of this freaking world! I kid you not! Beyond the best meat sauce I can ever remember having! I can’t take any credit for it. This one is all ICE’s recipe and my classmate, Holly made it in our group. I helped dice the veggies and tasted it for seasoning. Does that count? I don’t mess with perfection. I just grabbed some before they added the homemade gluten-full pasta and heavy cream, packed it up and brought it home to finish with my own gluten-free pasta.

While cooking the pasta, I reheated the meat sauce and added in the heavy cream. In school, we learned Italians don’t load the pasta with sauce and top it with grated cheese. They just coat it lightly and add the cheese into the sauce, if there is any. Chef James also taught us to put the finished sauce into a saute pan and toss the cooked pasta into the pan with the sauce. This ensures it is coated evenly and keeps the pasta together. It’s also very important to save some of the pasta water in case you need to thin out your sauce a little at the end. I suppose I did a very un-Italian thing with this dish by adding some basil and shaved parmesan cheese on top. That was just to make it a little prettier for the pictures. Did it work? It tasted pretty damn good too!

Whether or not this is the most beautiful dish you’ve seen, it will definitely be one of the tastiest! The fact that I left the bolognese sauce overnight before putting it together probably even made it more delicious. Sauces like these always tend to develop more flavor over time.

We continued learning about the different regions of Italy this week. I really love Italian food but the pasta and bread complicated things for me a bit. Oh well. I brought in my own breadcrumbs for some of the dishes including an amazing branzino wrapped in prosciutto and some arab-inspired meatballs with pine-nuts and raisins. So good! Once again, my classmates rocked it in terms of always looking to adapt recipes any way they could to make them gluten-free. I actually started blogging about Life as a (Gluten-Free) Culinary Student on my school’s blog this week. I love that ICE is giving me the opportunity to spread the word about celiac and food allergies in the culinary community!

We’re starting the cuisine of Asia next week. I’ve always loved Asian food however, we don’t dine at Asian restaurants as a family since sesame, nuts and soy (gluten) are fundamental ingredients. I’m excited to learn how I can recreate those dishes at home with my own gluten-free and allergy-friendly staples. Stay tuned…

P.S. I was recently nominated for “Top 25 Foodie Moms” on Circle of Moms. No idea how it happened but you gotta imagine I’m pretty psyched to be included with this great list of food bloggers. You can vote for me every day here through June 4th (and by “can”, I mean “must”). Just kidding (not really).

 

 

Read the original on: JackieOurman.com | CAFE by Jackie Ourman