LAMB & PORK BOLOGNESE

Steps:

• 1. Place your medium to large cooking pot, over medium heat, and add the olive oil and butter.
• 2. Once the butter has melted, add the finely diced green pepper, garlic, carrots, celery & onion. Add in a couple generous pinches of kosher salt. Allow these ingredients to simmer in the butter & oil for 5 minutes, on med heat, stirring frequently.
• 3. Add diced pancetta and adjust heat to med-high. Stir frequently and allow pancetta to become golden in color, approx 10 minutes. The vegetables will continue to soften as well.
• 4. Increase heat to high and add, "1/3 @ a time, the ground lamb and Italian sausage. Break up the meat as well as possible and allow to cook, not boil, until done. Now add the second 1/3 and repeat. Now add the final 1/3 of both meats. (If you prefer some other meat, use what you wish cooking with the same method.)
• 5. After all the meat has browned and no meat lumps exist, set the timer to 15 minutes and continue to brown. It doesn't matter if some of the meat gets crispy (a little) and some may stick to the bottom of the pot as well, which is what you want at this point in the cooking process. This allows the meat to caramelize and allows the flavors to concentrate.
• 6. After you see some nice caramelizing of the meat, reduce the heat to medium so as not to burn the meat.
• 7. After the 15 minutes has passed, add 1 cup of dry white wine. Using a wooden spoon, stir mixture removing bits of meat that may have stuck to the bottom of the pot, a couple minutes should suffice.
• 8. Add the milk & beef stock/broth with heat on medium.
• 9. Add tomatoes and all the juice from can. I cubed my peeled tomatoes as I wanted the tomatoes to be slightly smaller pieces.
• 10. Add a "generous" grinding of black pepper. I used approx 1 to 1 1/2 teaspoons of black pepper in total for the recipe. Adjust to your taste...
• 11. Bring contents of cooking pot to a boil now, stirring frequently.
• 12. Now, reduce heat to as low as possible and simmer for 4 hours. Leave your pot half covered with the lid. Stir infrequently during the 4 hours, just keeping an eye on it. If you think your sauce is a bit to thick or if it's sticking to the bottom of the pot, add a bit more beef stock/broth. The sauce needs to be toward the thicker side, in my opinion.
• 13. Optional steps: Now you can serve of your choice of pasta or place the pot in the refrigerator over night, which I chose. I prefer to let the flavor concentrate overnight in the pot. Your choice.
• 14. If you chose to refrigerate overnight, you're ready to continue here. Place the pot back on "low" heat. I allowed my gravy/ragu/sauce (word of choice) to heat very slowly.
• 15. Once I noticed that the gravy was nice and hot, I added 2 tablespoons of room-temp butter and stirred that in.
• 16. Finally - it's ready! You can use any style of pasta you like. I used Basil Fettuccine. Lastly, I also used much, fresh grated, Parmigiano-Reggiano - - a must! Cheers and Bon Appetit...