Spaghetti alla teramana

Braisin' Squad

So, welcome to… Braise?

I’m not 100% certain what Braise is. Which is half of how I ended up on the name, because I confess I don’t really know what braising is either. It’s a cooking thing. I know I do it a lot. Often to beef (?). Is it stewing? Yes, basically. But also, no. It’s braising.

If you know, you know. And I don’t really know.

Which brings us back to Braise.

I think about food a lot. And thanks to my job, I write a lot. But I don’t really write about food. Like, ever. At all.

I used to, years ago, and I was rubbish at it - nice bit of expectation setting for you there. Will I be better now? I hope so, but that’s not really the point of this whole thing anyway.

The point is just to hurl some words out into the void - by which I mean you, here, reading this. I’ll write about things I cook and things I eat. More of the latter than the former, but not always in a structured way. I’ll probably write about restaurants and cookbooks, and maybe one day I’ll even figure out a way to share the map.

My approach to food may at times seem strange. I’m an obsessive eater, but one who goes through regular bouts of complete abstinence in the name of intermittent fasting, or gearing all my intake towards protein to suit my weightlifting. Sometimes I purge all carbs from my diet to go short-term keto, but then I abandon all my principles when Pophams announces a new weekend special because I have a specific stomach devoted entirely to patisserie.

It’s probably telling that I’ve kicked this whole thing off in a week where I’ve been fasting a little extra, carbing a little less. But also one where I threw all that out the window in the name of spaghetti and meatballs.

Cooked in honour of National Pasta Day (I promise, it gets better) to kickstart an Instagram account for my cats, one of whom is named Noodle (wait, is that better?), this was a last-minute quick supper cribbed from the pages of Rachel Roddy’s An A-Z of Pasta - a book I’ve read lustily but cooked from all too infrequently.

Spaghetti alla teramana uses tiny meatballs - the size of an index fingernail, or so the nonna in the recipe’s intro explains - which has the added bonus that you don’t need to worry about egg, breadcrumbs, milk, or anything else you’ve ever been told meatballs need for binding and bulking. A mix of pork and beef mince with a little salt and nutmeg is all it takes, pan-fried in butter before being thrown in (braised…?) with a simple tomato sauce.

Quick, simple, and yet somehow capable of dirtying three-quarters of the pans in my kitchen. And so good that the recipe came back out the next night.