Mince wonder part 3: Bolognaise

It was only a matter of time before I got round to posting my version of this old kitchen standard and it's yet another addition to my array of mince wonders following chilli con carne and shepherds' pie. Mince doesn't cost a lot and can also be replaced by veggie mince if necessary, making it flesh-dodger friendly, so this dish is really versatile, tasty and cheap. It's the ultimate student/laddish meal but nice enough for a more sedate dinner with polite company.

It's a cliché to refer to the 1970s as the decade that style forgot, but this isn't really fair. Sure, the fashion was largely pretty ludicrous, but this was also the decade that gave us punk and decimalisation. It's also the time when we Brits started to look to our new European chums for food and style tips. These aspirations to European cool may have left a lot to be desired by today's standards, but then again, you do need to learn to shit in a potty before you can use the toilet.

70s fashion
This much polyester in one location is now banned due to the fire risk

In the 1970s spaghetti bolognaise was the absolute fucking zenith of continental sophistication. In fact this dish is so 70s you could put a droopy moustache on it and call it Peter Wyngarde. I know it's easy to scoff with the benefit of hindsight, but its competition in terms of continental sophistication at the time included crème caramel in plastic pots; Colman's Beef Bourgignon ready-made sauce mix in a sachet; and Blue fucking Nun Liebfraumilch German white wine, so it won hands down on being something that tasted nice.

Label from a Blue Nun bottle
and a video giving correct response to being offered this awful excuse for wine

Anything from mainland Europe was considered stylish. Even British cars of the time had an aura of continental mystique about them with names like Allegro, Cortina and Capri. This was, of course, long before our era of Easyjet and Ryanair flights, the Channel Tunnel and the EU. This was an age when these places across the Channel in Europe were exotic and sophisticated. They were separated from us by water, they were "other". These countries were so exotic you needed visas to enter them, so sophisticated that you could get ameobic dysentery from merely looking at a glass of the local tap water (or so travel advice of the time would lead you to believe).

Europe had an edge, it seemed a dangerous place. There was often a pervading mistrust of Germany from those who had lived through WWII. France ate funny-shaped bread, molluscs and amphibians. Spain was just recovering from being under a Fascist dictatorship and was on the verge of a military coup in order to return it to one at any time (yes, this really almost happened).

Nowadays things are different. Forty years on and we find that we Brits are more worldly wise. Foreign travel is nothing we think twice about. We pay the price of a pint of Belgian lager (brewed under licence in Wales) allowing us to be herded onto a 737 to Barcelona or Bratislava for a weekend. We get there and immediately find an Irish pub to get shit-faced on Guinness while watching the Man U game before getting a Big Mac on the way back to our hotel to crash out before a full English in the morning to dissolve the hangover. Like I said, exotic and oh-so-fucking worldly.

As I've alluded to in other blog entries, this was my very first taste of Italian food. As I've also alluded to, I was raised in a house that was hardly an outpost of culinary exploration. Bolognaise in my family went through various incarnations as I grew up though, in fairness, many of them were actually quite tasty if not authentically Bolognaise. For example, baked beans don't really grow on trees in the fair city of Bologna, but did find their way into some of my parents' incarnations of this ragout but made for a reasonably palatable dinner. My version is a bit more authentic and certainly doesn't have baked fucking beans in it.

INGREDIENTS
500g beef mince (or vegetarian mince if you are so inclined)
2 tbsp olive oil
1 large onion, finely chopped
1 stick celery, finey chopped
1medium carrot, finely chopped
4 large cloves of garlic, crushed
250g mushrooms, coarsely chopped
2 tins of tomatoes (or replace 1 tin with a 500g carton of pasata)
2 table spoons of tomato puree
1 tsp mixed, dried herbs
1 bay leaf
1 tsp paprika
Freshly ground black pepper to taste
1 beef stock cube
150ml red wine
2 tsp balsamic vinegar
2 tsp Worcester sauce
Dash of Tabasco sauce (optional)
2 tsp dark soy sauce

RECIPE

The vegetables
Carrot, celery, garlic, onion and mushrooms.
Note how finely chopped they are, apart from the mushrooms

In a heavy saucepan dry-fry the mince to brown it for about 5 minutes (essentially until it's cooked), making sure it's well broken up with no lumps, and pour it into a sieve to get rid of the excess fat.

To the empty pan add the olive oil and heat on medium before adding the onion and garlic to fry for 5 minutes.

Throw in the celery and carrot and gently cook for 10 more minutes, ong enough to soften, then add the mushrooms for another 5 minutes until they look cooked.

Return the cooked mince to the pan and add the tomatoes, breaking them up (or use chopped tinned tomatoes), before stirring well and adding the herbs, bay leaf, paprika, black pepper and mix well.

Crumble the stock cube in and squirt in the tomato puree, again stirring well.

Pour in the wine, balsamic vinegar, Worcester sauce and (if you're using it) Tabasco.

Stir well, bring to the boil then turn down the heat to simmer with the lid on for at least an hour, ideally two or more.

Keep checking intermittently and stirring. Leave the lid off for a while if the sauce is too liquid.

It's a pan of pasta sauce
What more do you want?

This recipe makes plenty for four adults.
Serve with pasta (well, duh!) and bread

NOTES
As a pasta sauce this needs to be nice and smooth, so the onions, carrot and celery need to be finely chopped. Also, make sure the mince is nicely broken up when frying it. The mushrooms add a bit of texture so need to be chopped larger. It's actually a good way to hide vegetables if you have a sprog with an aversion to culinary plant matter.

Using pasata instead of a tin of tomatoes makes a more smooth, almost creamy texture. Tinned tomatoes are cheaper though

Tabasco adds a bit of subtle piquancy so don't use too much. It's not supposed to be "spicy". On the other hand, my piquant might leave some chilli-dodgers with steam blowing out of their ears. These things are relative so leave it out if you or your guest(s) are effete.

Pasta for this is traditionally spaghetti, but in the Sweary household we tend to use something that takes less cutlery skill to eat, like penne or fusilli, mainly because Mrs Sweary can't eat spaghetti without looking like an extra from True Blood when she's finished (see picture for an idea of what I mean).

Darling, but you've got a wee bit of sauce round your mouth.
I told you you should have ordered penne for your bolognaise instead of spaghetti

70s fashion pics from https://www.pinterest.com/hippyali/70s-men/ and http://www.paintlouisville.org/70s-fashion-trends.html. Blue Nun label image from https://www.flickr.com/photos/jassy-50/13336957223. Messy eater picture sourced from http://weheartit.com/entry/154371114/in-set/93667449-blood?context_user=loverofsatan666&page=2

Hyderbadi black pepper chicken

Spices are incredible things. Seeds, fruits, roots, even tree bark. They generally look, at best, unimpressive and at worst just plain fucking nasty. Take the star anise. It looks like a brown shuriken but adds the subtle aniseed flavour to Chinese cuisine. Cloves look like rusty nails but they also give the heady, numbing aroma to mulled wine. Worst of all is root ginger which looks like Boris Johnson but is an integral flavour as part of Indian and Chinese food. and of course in sweet recipes like ginger biscuits and cakes. Without spices food would be just so dull.

Spices and the things they resemble
(from top: a star anise and a shuriken; a clove and a rusy nail; root ginger and BoJo)

I could go off on a tangent and twat on about how some spices are important in traditional Chinese, Ayuvedic and other historic mystical system of pseudo-medicine and they can cure all sorts of shit but if you're a regular follower of this blog you'll know I don't subscribe to any of that new age bollocks. True, herbs and spices, like any natural products from animals or plants, contain all manner of substances which may have beneficial effects and there is a lot of good research underway to look into these possibilities. Sometimes the effects aren't necessarily beneficial. For example, I could mention how capsaicin, the component that makes chilli hot, is actually neurotoxic, how you can actually get high on nutmeg if you eat enough of it and if you eat too many poppy seeds you can test positive for heroin at roadside drugs tests. Indeed the "poppy seed defence" is a well known in legal circles when people have claimed that their positive drug test was due to eating a poppy seed bagel rather than being off their tits on smack.

Anyway, onto the recipe in hand. If you've read a few of these entries you'll know I really love my spices. Most of these dishes have a good measure of spice, especially chilli.This doesn't have so much as a whisper of chilli in it. It isn't actually a curry. Yes, it's Indian. Yes, it's got some spice content. Yes, it's actually hot in a spicy way, but it's not really a curry. No coriander, no cumin, no aromatic spices, no chilli. I ranted about what made a curry in one of my previous entries but this doesn't fall into that category because it's only got tumeric, ginger, garlic and black pepper. Lots and lots of black pepper.

I have to say that this dish is probably one of the tastiest things I have ever cooked. The combination of black pepper, vinegar, ginger, garlic and onion is actually quite magical.

INGREDIENTS
2 tsp ginger-garlic paste
1 tsp salt
4 tsp crushed back peppercorns
2 tbsp white wine vinegar
1 tsp ground tumeric
3 tbsp vegetable oil
500g chicken fillet, diced
1 onion, puréed
1 onion, sliced

RECIPE
Mix the garlic-ginger paste with 1 tsp of the black pepper, all of the tumeric and vinegar and 2 tsp of the oil.

Add the chicken and stir, ensuring it's well coated, before putting in the fridge to marinate for 2-3 hours.

Add the remaining oil to a pan, and the rest of the black pepper then fry for a few seconds before adding the sliced onion. Sauté this until soft then add the puréed onion and fry until it starts to gain some colour.

Add the marinated chicken along with any liquid from the marinade and gently cook the chicken through. How long this takes obviously depends in what form the chicken is. For this entry I used diced chicken breast which took 15-20 minutes, though other times I've used chicken on the bone which is in bigger pieces and so takes longer, but I'll come onto that in the notes.

Makes enough for two adults served with rice or an Indian bread, plus maybe a vegetable curry to make a more complete meal

NOTES
Garlic-ginger paste is exactly as it's described: mushed up garlic cloves and fresh ginger. I pounded it into a paste in a pestle and mortar, but you could use a small hand blender. If you don't have either you could get away with crushing the garlic and grating the ginger then mashing it up further with the back of a spoon. Two teaspoons is about 2-3 cloves of garlic and a small thumb-sized piece of root ginger. The actual amount you need isn't actually that critical, as long as there's enough to coat the chicken as part of the marinade.

The original recipe for this was from celeb chef Atul Korcher and uses a whole chicken cut into 8 pieces. That's shit-loads more chicken than I needed since I made this for two people. Also, the original cooking method is a bit of a pain in the arse with on-the-bone chicken plus originally the recipe used 100ml oil which is way too much though makes cooking larger chicken pieces easier but makes the dish greasier than a Tory MP who fell in an oil slick while lubing himself up to participate in an orgy.

Using diced chicken may lose out on flavour of bone-in chicken, but it's so much easier to make as the chicken really needs to be rubbed with the marinade if it's in big, bony lumps. This makes the preparation more messy than Mr Messy visiting a scat party (possibly attended by a ready-lubed up Tory MP) and has the effect of giving your fingers the look of someone who smokes 40 a day plus if you have a cut on your finger it hurts like hell, thanks to the vinegar.

Mongolian Beef Stew

The flag of Mongolia.
It's rather nice

Undoubtedly the most famous Mongolian is Genghis Khan who ruled the Mongol hordes that rampaged across Central Asia into Eastern Europe in the 13th century. He was also, according to legend, the grandfather of Kublai Khan who, besides being probably the world's second most famous Mongolian, was also a dab hand at building. Well, according to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem named after him, at any rate. Coleridge wrote "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree". Apparently this Xanadu place was fucking immense. It was so big it had a river running through it, entire forests and even the odd hill. This description may need to be taken with a bit of a pinchof salt, though since, Coleridge was out of his head on opium when he wrote it. Mind you, it does appear to detail what was probably the very first concept of a theme park. He'd basically invented Disneyland but was too off his tits to build it. The poem also gave rise to the wonderful slice of 70s cheese from Olivia Newton John and ELO, below, from the film of the same name. I don't think that version of Xanadu was in Mongolia, besides which, Coleridge would have been having some truly nightmarish hallucinations if he had dreamt up the roller disco, assuming there was room to build one between the many an incense bearing tree or sinuous rills.

Xanadu by ONJ and ELO with appearances from Gene Kelly, no less

Anyway, back on topic. There are a few other ethnically named dishes on the blog that aren't especially authentic and this is one no different. My Mongolian beef stew is about as Mongolian as my arse. For a start it's not made with yak, has no trace of fermented ewe's milk to bulk it up and it's been nowhere near a yurt. It is based on recipes I found in a few sources claiming to have Mongolian provenance, though these also seem more Amir Khan than Genghis Khan but, fuck it, it's got soy sauce, black bean sauce and water chestnuts in it, so how exotic do you want?

Frequently twatted on about by regular blog guest, Rick Stein, when he's waxing lyrical about how they are "so comforting" or "like mother used to make", stews are generally easy, cheap and filling. Thing is, my mother used to make the most boring fucking stews ever. I was lucky if it had a stock cube in it. Even so, meat cooked for a fucking age with vegetables will develop a reasonable taste on its own. Therefore it doesn't take much more to make a stew or casserole that tastes great. Often in the West we do this by cooking in booze, like French Boeuf Bourguinon in wine, beef in Guinness or Carbonnade (pork in beer) from Belgium. Many oriental dishes use lots of coconut to give fragrant, creamy stews. However, this recipe, has lots of soy sauce and black bean sauce which combines with the slow-cooked beef to give a thick, rich, satisfying plateful of genuine comfort with an exotic flavour. It's basically oral sex from a furcoat-wearing Ulaanbataar prostitute in casserole form

INGREDIENTS
2 tbsp olive oil
400g diced stewing beef
1 onion, chopped
3 garlic cloves, crushed
1 carrot, peeled and sliced
1 tin water chestnuts (140g drained weight), drained and sliced
200ml water
2 tbsp dark soy sauce
2 tbsp dry sherry
120g black bean sauce
pinch dried chilli flakes
Black pepper
pinch 5 spice powder
1 tbsp tomato puree
1 tsp honey

RECIPE
Pour the oil in a pan and heat then add the beef and sautée until browned. Remove with a slotted spoon.

To the remaining juices and oil add the onion and garlic then fry until soft. Throw in the carrot and water chestnuts and return the meat to the pan.

Add the water, soy, sherry and black bean sauce and stir.

Stir in the chili flakes, 5 spice and plenty of black pepper then mix in the tomato puree and the honey.

Stir well and heat to boiling in the pan.

Cover and turn the heat right down then leave to gently simmer for at least two hours, stirring occasionally. The meat should be nice and tender, almost falling apart.

In the pan it looks like any other stew

Makes enough for two people served with rice, and looks like this:

NOTES
I got onto this recipe because my wife happened to mention that she fancied something made with lamb. I went to my local Co-Op where they had no lamb, so I got beef instead. Besides, it works best as a beef dish with the thick dark gravy made from the soy sauce. Pork or lamb may also work but you might need to tone down the soy sauce, perhaps using light rather than dark.

For black bean sauce, I used Blue Dragon Black Bean Stir Fry sauce, mainly because it was the only thing they had involving black beans in my local super market. This may be a bastardised version of black bean sauce, with all sorts of other stuff in it for the purposes of stir frying, but it works.You could use some more authentic black bean sauce as purchased from a Chinese grocer (or bigger supermarket) if you can be arsed. If using real black bean sauce, add about two big tablespoons.

Many vegetables you might want to put in a stew that needs to cook for a long time will disintegrate by the time the meat is tender enough to eat (eg peppers, courgette). Hard root vegetables work best in maintaining their integrity, like the carrots in this version, which go soft as long as they don't get cooked too long. Water chestnuts, however don't change in the slightest and stay crispy. They are integral to the dish add crunch to the meat which should be falling apart by the time the recipe is served. Another good thing about them is they are tinned so having a couple of tins in the cupboard means you can make this anytime you fancy

You could leave out the chilli flakes if you're not a fan of heat. Also, it's a good idea to not add too much 5 spice powder because if you overdo it, the whole thing will taste like aniseed balls.

Chicken chow mein

Yes, it's supposed to be chow mein and this is Chop Suey.   
It's a great song so fucking sue me

While I've been doing this blog I've done recipes from various parts of the world, but so far not from China, as such. And that's not going to change with this recipe, since this is yet another bastardised/Anglicised variation on an authentic regional dish. OK, it's Chinese, in that the ingredients are oriental but, like chicken tikka masala in Indian restaurants, it's basically thrown together to appease the delicate pallets of us poor, fragile westerners. There's no sharks' fin, no rotten smelling durian fruit, no bird's nest composed of dried avian spit (or other exotic ingredient regarded as a delicacy in the orient). Not that there's anything wrong with these ingredients from a culinary point of view per se. Tastes vary around the world and what one culture find a delicacy other people find repugnant. I mean, nobody east of the Danube in their right mind would even consider bringing a lump of rancid, congealed, mouldy milk (or "blue cheese" as we refer to it in Western Europe) anywhere near their mouth, never mind eat it. Or there is surströmming arguably the most disgusting "delicacy" in the world, which is a tinned form of effectively rotten fish originating in Sweden. On the other hand, and taking a broader view, the demand for sharks' fin in the east and in oriental restaurants all over the world is seriously depleting the global population of sharks. This is because sharks' fin soup is a luxury dish and a burgeoning middle class in countries like China, Singapore and Malaysia, keen to show off their wealth and status, has increased demand.

I've eaten sharks' fin soup. It tasted delicious. Not because of the fin but because of the ingredients that went to make the broth of the soup. The fin itself added fuck all to the flavour, only being present as strips of slightly chewy gristle floating in the broth.

This raises an obvious question. If it doesn't have any taste of its own, why is sharks' fin so popular? It's so highly prized because, according to traditional Chinese medicine, it's supposed to impart sexual potency. So sharks are being hunted to extinction because businessmen can't get a stiffy. That is bad enough, but there is actually no evidence that sharks' fin is in any way an effective remedy for erectile dysfunction. In fact, since sharks are apex predators, they accumulate toxic metals like mercury in their tissues which can lead to all manner of health problems including sterility and erectile dysfunction in men. Ahh, the irony. Personally, if any bloke wants to show his social status or how magnificent his tumescence is, I think he should buy a bigger car, shag his secretary then just fuck off, and leave sharks alone. Or try Viagra.

Dragging myself back on track, noodles are huge in east Asia. They are the perfect foodstuff: filling, cheap and versatile. They are popular street food, taste fantastic and really keep these countries running.You can have fried dishes like this or soups with noodles in. In fact most eastern Asian countries have their own versions of a noodle dishes: pad Thai in Thailand, mee goreng and laksa in Malaysia, Japanese udon. They are the origin of pasta, brought back from China by Marco Polo, apparently. Like shark fin, they also taste largely of fuck all. This means they need a well-flavoured sauce (or broth in soup recipes) and other ingredients to turn them into something worth eating.

This is a really easy dish to make. The most time-consuming part is preparing the ingredients. Chopping carrots into matchstick-sized pieces, slicing peppers into strips and finely chopping ginger are a collective pain in the arse, but they cook quicker and the results are worthwhile.

INGREDIENTS
150g dry egg noodles
300g chicken fillet cut into strips
2 tbsp light soy
black pepper
3 or 4 cloves garlic, crushed
1 piece ginger (about 3 cm), finely chopped
1 small bunch spring onions, cut diagonally into pointy sticks
1 small-medium carrot, cut into matchstick sized strips
1 red pepper, cut into thin strips
100g washed bean sprouts (about a handful)
200g mushrooms, sliced
2 tbsp vegetable oil (not olive, see notes!)

Sauce
2tbsp dark soy
1 tbsp sweet chilli sauce (the thick dipping kind)
3 tbsp dry sherry 
1 tbsp sesame oil
1 tsp sugar

RECIPE
Put the chicken in a bowl and pour the light soy over it and add a liberal grind of pepper.

Mix them well so they are well coated in the soy and put in the fridge to marinate for a couple of hours or so.

Boil up a large pan of water and add the noodles.

Simmer gently until they are soft, about 5 minutes (depends on their thickness). Drain them and set aside.

Make up the sauce by adding the dark soy, chilli sauce, sherry, sesame oil and sugar to a cup and mix well then set aside.

Add half the oil to a frying pan or wok and heat until it's very hot.

Stir fry the chicken until it's cooked (about 10 minutes).

Remove the meat with a slotted spoon, leaving the oil plus any juices from the cooked chicken in the pan.

Add the remaining oil and the throw in the garlic and ginger and stir fry for about a minute.

Throw in the carrot, pepper, spring onion and mushroom and stir fry for 5-10 minutes.

Add the bean sprouts and carry on stir frying for another couple of minutes.

Return the chicken to the pan and keep moving on the heat to make sure everything is warmed.

Refresh the noodles by running them under the cold tap, drain well and add them to the pan.

Try to mix up everything and once the noodles are warmed through add the sauce mixture, and the best way I've found to do this is to gently turn them over like you might do when dressing a salad.

I would add a warning that it is a bit of a ballache to make sure that the noodles are mixed with all the other ingredient.

NOTES
Use a neutral-flavoured oil for this, like sunflower or soya, but NOT olive oil which has too much flavour and is definitely not Chinese and doesn't tolerate the high heat you need to stir fry.

The chilli sauce adds a little spicy edge to the sauce as well as a bit of sweetness and stickiness. It should be the Thai sweet type as made by the likes of Blue Dragon or Encona. These aren't very hot, but if you really can't tolerate chilli, leave it out. Then again, if you do have an aversion to chilli, why are you using a cookery blog which has a significant Scoville rating in almost every recipe?

You can put lots of different vegetables in this. I've done the same recipe with combinations including mange tout, sugar snap peas, green beans, baby sweet corn, bamboo shoots, water chestnuts. They ought to be fairly crunchy, but otherwise it's up to you. You could also make it with any other meat like beef, pork or prawn. You could even omit meat altogether and make it vegetarian.

Recipes in Chinese cookery books suggest using Chinese rice wine, or sherry as an alternative. The sherry works perfectly well, but it needs to be a dry type. Something like a fino is what you need but definitely not Harvey's fucking Bristol Cream

Like rice, soy sauce is best bought from Asian supermarkets where you can get a huge bottle for the same price as you might pay for a tiny one in your usual place.

No pictures on this entry yet. I'll take some next time I make this.

This isn't intended to be a racist blog. The rant about sharks' fin is a rant against general fuckwittedness anywhere it raises its head in the human race. All of these superstition-based remedies are as idiotic as one another. For "Chinese traditional medicine" you could just as easily read "homeopathy" or "astrology". If this sounds cynical, I can't help it. I'm a Sagittarian, it's in my nature

Tomato pilaf

You might have noticed that I use some of the same ingredients in a lot of my recipes. Tomatoes are one of them. And why not? The press is full of stuff about how great they are, full of antioxidants like lycopene. Basically it's supposed to stop you getting cancer. Better still, tomatoes taste fucking great with pretty much everything.

Mind you, some pseudo-scientific fuckwits claim that all nightshade vegetables, of which tomatoes are one (a group also including peppers, chillies, potatoes and aubergines) are a bad thing to eat for a variety of reasons. These include the claim that they contain a toxic alkaloid, that tinned tomatoes contain a man-made toxin and that they can cause osteoporosis. This is all utter bullshit without any foundation in reality, let alone science, and I'm not giving these hysteria-promoting morons the privilege of a link.

Of course, not all tomatoes are good. It took George Clooney a good few years to get over appearing in this

INGREDIENTS
1 tbsp olive oil
1 small onion, finely chopped
1 large clove of garlic, crushed
1 tsp tomato puree
150g fresh tomatoes, peeled
350 ml vegetable stock (made by adding half a vegetable stock cube to 350ml of warm water)
200g rice
Salt
Pepper

RECIPE
Heat the oil in the a heavy-based pan and add the onion and garlic. Fry them until soft, about 5 minutes. Stir in the tomato puree and add the tomatoes and stir well. Add the rice, stir so that it's coated with the tomato mixture then pour in the stock plus salt and pepper to taste. Heat until it's boiling, turn down the heat and cover for 10 minutes or more, until the rice has absorbed the liquid. Serve.

This makes enough for two-three adults.

Tomato pilaf served with pork afelia

NOTES
No pictures of the preparation for this entry. It's rice that's a sort of reddy-orangey colour, what do you need a frigging picture of?

It doesn't need any fancy rice. I used Thai jasmine rice which is what I use for most things. It needs to be quite a moist dish though.

Peeling tomatoes is a regal pain the arse. What you do is pour boiling water into a heatproof jug then cut a slit in the skin of your tomato before throwing it in the boiling water for 20 seconds or so. This should make the skin pucker and shrivel up so it looks similar in colour and texture to David Dickinson. It then becomes easy to peel off. One or two are OK, but doing a lot of tomatoes takes ages and becomes more difficult as the water cools. You could probably get away with using some tinned tomatoes, but you'd have to add less water.

This is tomato PILAF, not to be confused with Edith PIAF. though if it were about her, I daresay she may have changed her signature torch song to "Non, je ne regrette riz"
(a little linguistic humour there)

This goes really well with something like my pork afelia which I also recently posted