This ain’t no foodie blog – it’s a pretend-to-be-your-favourite-chef blog. Today, I’m being Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.

So last time we drowned pork chops in Madeira and cream. And they were good. While we’re sticking with pork again this week, we’re going down-market but arguably more up-flavour if, like Scoob, you dig rausages. This week, its the tale of the Ragu, Bologna-style.

When I first noticed that I was sliding dangerously into watching food programmes on the telly, I fell in love with the romance of River Cottage and its inventor, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. I bought a few of his books and tried quite a few of his recipes over the years (e.g. baked ham with spiced figs, saffron and garlic mash, washed down with strawberry water-ice gelato) way before Gourmet Wednesday. He was also inspiring in relation to the bit of back-yard gardening I do; spuds, tomatoes, peas, herbs and so on – the relatively easy stuff. I had to draw the line at chickens, however. My 50% survival rate with plants is one thing, letting half a flock-of-fowl die would be way too flocking much for the latent Buddhist in me. Nor did I dig the rising-before-dawn-and-crunching-through-the-frost reality of ACTUAL small-hold farming aspect. My skillset lies more in the region of armchair husbandry.

On this occasion, though I am pretending to be HFW, I shall describe a dish I copied from one of the many iterations of my current favourite, Rick Stein. Whether Porsching across France, Land Rovering around Cornwall or spending long weekends anywhere from Iceland to Greece and a hell of a lot in between, Mr. Stein, it seems, finds virtually everything amazing. This is infectious. Though there are a few things I mightn’t share his enthusiasm for, his ragu is a total winner. Having picked the stereotypical home of Spaghetti Bolognese for one of his Long Weekends, he showed us how to make this ragu. You will need tagliatelle , sausage meat and a few herbs and spices, some wine and some cream.

I decided to have a crack at making home made tagliatelle too. We’d been given a gift of a pasta-maker many moons ago which was the obvious thing to use. The only problem with the pasta-maker was that we’d looked at it so often and threatened so many times to use it, and hadn’t, that we’d given it away. But no hassle. A rolling pin and a knife is all you need to make home made pasta. So I gave it a shot. Its time consuming, but you feel like, well, Jamie Oliver. Plus, its quite fun; like playing with morla, only it tastes WAY better when you eat it.

Anyway, the best bit about this ragu is that – for Irish people, of course – you can use your fave sausage meat, whether that’s SuperValu’s Superquinn, Rudds, Hicks etc or best of all, your local butcher’s own recipe. All you have to do is squeeze the sausage meat out of its skin – great job to give the kids – and hey presto, cheap, tasty pork. I would not recommend doing this with sausages from any other country, for what the Irish regard as a sausage rarely compares. Don’t get me wrong, I’d kill for a bratwurst with German mustard on it right now, come to think of it. But it’s a different thing. As Keith Floyd would say to his cameraman when he focused for a second too long on the food Floyd was in the process of cooking, ‘Back to me!’, and in this case, the ragu.

So I fried the rausage meat for about 10 minutes, threw in some onion, celery, rosemary, chilli and garlic (I ditched the fennel seeds that Rick uses; I like fennel, but its a strong flavour and I wanted to keep this a bit plainer to allow the sausies to dominate). At this point, I decided to taste the Italian pinot grigio bought for the recipe; it wouldn’t do to ruin a delicious meal by pouring the wrong wine into it. It passed the test over the course of the fifteen minutes that the veg and the pork were communing gently over a medium heat.

One final slug of the pinot and in went about 150mls of the stuff as well as the same amount of cream and stock. The ragu needed about 30 more minutes bubbling gently on a flame, to turn it into a piece of art you could sink your teeth into. By now I was salivating like Pavlov’s very own Scooby-Doo.

It was time to talk to the pasta and see how he was doing. He was doing well, close to being ready to pop in a pot of boiling agua. (I didn’t tell him about the water, he was just relaxing there on the back of the chair and the chopping board and I didn’t want to harsh his buzz.) The advantage of fresh pasta, however, is that it needs way less time to cook than the packet stuff. So 25 minutes later, in went the tagliatelle mio (he just drifted off to sleep, peacefully) for about 4. You could leave it in for 5 or 6 if you don’t like plenty of al denty pasta with your meal. The result, if I say so myself, was non troppo male; pretty good.