Efficiency and effectiveness

[00:00:00] Well, hello. This is The Daily Five with Aurooba, that's me, where we reflect on creating our best lives a little bit every day. Here we go.

[00:00:15] I was making bolognese sauce today. Or, at least my version of it. And typically when I make it, I like to use passata, which is pureed, strained, uncooked tomatoes. And I cook it for a good 3 to 4 hours to get it just right. It has lean ground beef, onions, mushrooms, bell peppers, and spinach, as well as, of course, a good dose of spices.

[00:00:40] But you don't always have 4 hours to let a sauce simmer on low heat. So, I've experimented with a few different recipes. I tried using just store bought pasta sauce, I tried using tomato sauce, I tried to add less veggies, I tried a few different things, but you know, in addition to being quicker, I also still needed it to taste good and still taste the way I wanted it to, at least to some degree.

[00:01:05] Eventually, I landed on a recipe that uses half passata and half sweet basil pasta sauce for the base. And to make the sauce cooking process quicker, I pulse the mushrooms until they essentially become almost quite a paste. In my house, mushrooms in the sauce are essential for that extra Um, meaty and kind of darks taste to the sauce.

[00:01:28] But, you know, it takes mushrooms a good while to cook down to that right taste. By basically mincing them to practically a fine paste, you half, at least, the cooking time that is needed to get close to that taste. And of course, the other thing you want to do is you want to make sure you cut the veggies into fairly small pieces that are roughly the same size.

[00:01:51] We recently invested in one of those veggie choppers you see a lot of now. You know, you pop, say, half an onion on there and slam the lid down and it cuts them into perfect little square pieces. So not only did that help us create even, even small pieces, it makes the prep process considerably faster. So, not quite as gimmicky as I thought it would be.

[00:02:13] While the sauce still takes time to make, one to, say, one hour, fifteen minutes or so, from zero to done, it is still a far cry from however long the prep used to take and then a four hour simmer time. And I'd say the taste is about 80 to 90 percent the same, which is pretty good for only roughly 25 percent of the time it would normally take.

[00:02:35] In fact, most of the time, this is the version of the bolognese sauce we make in our house now. We just don't have a lot of time often to make that fully simmered sauce, unless we're making it for a very large gathering. We found that It's this perfect balance of efficiency and effectiveness with this recipe.

[00:02:56] It's far more efficient than the original recipe, and although not quite as effective, a. k. a. it's not, doesn't taste quite the same, it's more than effective enough. I think maybe the only people who could detect a difference would be my mom and maybe my spouse, because one, my bolognese sauce is heavily inspired by my mom's, and my spouse has had the original version quite a few times.

[00:03:22] You know, it's not easy to balance efficiency and effectiveness, and We've talked about this before, that they are not the same thing. Efficiency is how quickly you can do something. Effectiveness is how well you can do something. And it can be really difficult to know what the balance is, what the right balance can be, until you try a few things.

[00:03:47] And you don't always have the opportunity or the time to try more than a few things, or more than even one thing. But when you find that right balance in any situation between effectiveness and efficiency, it tends to be a really good combo. In our situation, it means that that's the sauce we make, you know?

[00:04:10] We don't go for that full effectiveness level because the efficiency there is Non existent, kind of, and this gets us nearly there. So, uh, today when we were cooking that, that was kind of what I was thinking about. About how we've found this really perfect balance and it makes creating this dish that we love so much easier.

[00:04:33] So, yeah, just some food for thought today, quite literally.

[00:04:45] Thanks for listening. Same time tomorrow?