Cook spaghetti in salted boiling water to the desired texture (How do you know if its cooked? Use a chopstick to pick a strand and have a chew. If the spaghetti doesn’t stick to your teeth when you bite, it’s pretty much ready. To those who keep time, sorry. I’m one for biting on uncooked pasta until it is cooked.)
- Pour the spaghetti out into a netted bowl thingy to strain the water away. Sprinkle cold water on the pasta to keep it from sticking together.
- Chop a large onion till each piece is about the size of peanuts… the nut, not the shell.
- Put oil in a pot to begin the sauce. There should be just enough to glisten the onions that you’ll dump in immediately when the oil gets hot, but not too much that onions are swimming in lard. (How do you know when the pot is hot? Well, hover a palm over the pot and feel lah)
- When onions start to look like they are edible (i.e. soft), dump in a can of tomato soup (I use Campbell. For the dummy’s dummy, the contents of the can, not the can). Add water if you think the sauce is too thick.
- Stir the pot with a wooden stirring utensil right to the bottom of the pot so that no onion is left at the bottom to burn, don’t use a steel utensil or you’d be scrapping metal into your sauce.
- Add minced meat (any kind you fancy), however much you like minced meat in your bolognese.
- Break up minced meat if they seem too clung together to you. Break them up really well unless you want to eat meat balls or if you’re okay with uneven distribution of meat and sauce later to your hungry lab rats.
- Add sugar and salt to taste (meaning bit by bit until it tastes right to you) and stir occasionally till the sauce boils. The boiling won’t look like water’s furious bubbling. It’ll resemble the bloop-blooping of magma.
- Serve spaghetti with sauce on top. Grate some cheese on top for show. (What cheese? Whichever you like lah. I sometimes put finely sliced cucumber for some vegetable intake).