If nothing's happening so fast, I guess this must be Sunday

We spent a lovely evening yesterday, having dinner with friends (after an afternoon that was more ambiguous: I have married into a critiquing group full of friends, and I'm really not sure how I feel about it; I don't feel useful to them, and I'm not sure the group is useful to me - I've never quite bought into the notion that lots of various feedback is inherently a good thing*). There was chicken, and an almond pie that I cannot wait to marry with my apricots; and wine, and foodie talk and other talks and yay for company. And cats. I get to feed other people's cats next week, and at last feel truly useful...

And then we drove home, and there was fog. Much fog, as is traditional in a San Francisco summer. It was cold and wet and foggy, till we were out of it.

Neither of us slept early (indeed, we both got up in the early hours and did our non-sleeping things for a while), so we both slept late; and it was intended that we should drive to SFO at lunchtime to collect Kate Elliott, take her to Kit Kerr's house and all of us chow down together till Kate had to go back to the airport for more flying. But, well. Remember that fog? Still around. Flights late, flights delayed, flights uncertain: all plans eventually cancelled.

And then we thought we might go to a mall, but we were in plan-cancelling mode by then; so now K is napping in the living-room, and I am working intermittently on a new kind of apricot jam (yesterday's preserves being delicious but very runny: no pectin, I guess, to speak of - so unlike the home life of our own dear marmalades...).

And now it's four o'clock already, and how did that happen exactly? And I shall sally forth, leaving m'drowsy wife, to buy beef and red wine. I shall devote the rest of the day to making bolognese, or spaghetti sauce as it is known in these parts; though I may in fact drink the wine. I may in fact drink more wine than you can possibly imagine.


*The corollary to this, of course, is that neither have I bought into the notion that a single beta-reader providing a coherent point of view is inherently a good thing. You can trust a person to hell and back, and they can still be wrong...

Saucery

Heh, this is interesting. So here I am making what I call a bolognese sauce, viz that take on Italian cooking that has become a British staple; but in California I find that what I am making is spaghetti sauce, viz that take on Italian cooking that has become an American staple. These staples, needless to say, are not identical with each other, let alone with their source*.

So I was tasting cheerfully and thinking "this is coming along quite nicely", only then I thought "I bet the Americans would put more tomato in than I would natively expect, and I am after all cooking for Americans here" - so I came to the internets (where else?) to look at recipes for spaghetti sauce.

And, y'know? It's not only that they do indeed go for far more tomato. It is that I do not even recognise all of their tomato-ing. Tins of tomatoes, check; tomato paste, check (well, we call it tomato puree, but hey); and - tomato sauce? On top of all of that already? What is this tomato sauce? We don't have that, not in the UK, us.

Karen says it's like what you spread on pizzas, which I made a load of that for pizza night last month, but even so. Not quite seeing the point here. Um, help...? What is tomato sauce, and how does it differ from all these other forms of tomato-in-tins, and why is it added and is it needed and help?


*Heh, did you see what I did there?