500g ground beef (good quality)
200g shortcut bacon
200g sliced mild black olives
2x375g tins of crushed tomatoes
500g fresh pasta or a little less dry
chili powder
basil
oregano
garlic

Cut the bacon, not too finely though and throw it into the pan. add the garlic and chili powder remembering that you want enough for everything, not just the bacon. Add the other herbs then the mince. Some time around now you should also throw in the olives. Once the mince is vaguely browned, throw in the crushed tomatoes and give the whole lot a good stir. let it sit on a low heat for a bit, stirring occasionally.

Throw the pasta into a pot of boiling salted water. Leave it there for a time commensurate with its freshness etc. Drain it.


I make this every two weeks or so. Each time I do it a little differently, making use of whatever herbs etc are at hand. The last time I made it I included parsley and rosemary to see what would happen. I'll also use different pastas. Last time was tagliatelle, the time before agnolotti. Normally I'd have thought a heavy sauce with filled pasta might have been a bit much, but the were full of bacon and sun dried tomato so it meshed and tasted unconscionably sexy.

Anyone got any suggestions for improving it? I'm open to pretty much anything.

Toast your garlic first, so you can bring out some sweetness. Sweat some onions and add them.

I don't personally care for olives, so I would probably remove them, but that's neither here nor there. Other than that, it sounds tremendous. I really think some onion and toasting the garlic would add some seriously wicked flavor, though.

__________________
"Never try to teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time, and it annoys the pig." --Robert Heinlein

I'll do as you say next time. Honestly, I haven't added onion in the past mainly because of laziness. The garlic does get fried with the bacon for a minute or two while I sort out the rest of it. Would that be enough?

With regard to the olives. I actually came up with this while reminiscing about a meal my dad had made several years ago. He has a trademark modified Malaysian meatball curry (which is fecking AWESOME). One time he made it, he grabbed the wrong tin of crushed tomatoes, one that had sliced olives in it. It was an unusual flavour but I liked it. I deliberately chose a larger quantity of mild olives, because that way they're prominent without being overpowering. They were the sort you'd normally put on a pizza etc.

Personally, I'd use some fresh tomatoes and shove them in the oven for a bit with some sea salt and olive oil on top. Maybe reduce some stock and then throw the oven and canned tomatoes together with some nice white wine to give it a real kick. Onion sounds good too.

red wine
salt, sugar and pepper to taste.
oregano
less olives(200g drained weight? that's a lot, they are powerful)
onion
fresh tomato in the oven like previously said
cook it down for a while so all the flavours combine etc.

serve and enjoy with some rustic bread.

i would personally replace bacon with pepperoni, or you could just add them both in

Grate the shit out of some carrots and celery and dump that in with the mince.

The bacon and olives make it salty enough and the chili serves in place of pepper... I might put some in next time anyway to see if it makes a difference. The canned tomatoes I use are a fairly sweet lot anyway so I think sugar is unnecessary. The olives are really mild ones. 200g is fine, though in hindsight it would have been more like 150g. I ate some of them while preparing.