Beef slow cooked #ragu with homemade pasta and side salad #chezfrantzman
Step by step process:
Begin with 2lbs of beef, we used shank but many cuts will work, salt the beef and roughly cut into 2inch chunks.
We made two versions of this, one with red wine and one using beef stock; otherwise the ingredients were the same. We did the wine version in a dutch oven over low heat for 2.5 hours on the stovetop, the other we put in the oven for 2.5 hours at 350 F.
We seared the beef on medium heat with olive oil and salt, adding a bit of chopped red onion, garlic, dried thyme and bay leaf. As it browned and gave off its liquid we removed it; we poured in a half cup of red wine (or beef stock) then we added finely two large chopped carrots
two large finely chopped celery stalks, two bay leafs, one finely chopped red onion, one half finely chopped large yellow onion; three cloves of garlic minced; more salt; as this cooks down we added a cup of red wine/stock and then 4 tbsp tomato paste, 1 finely chopped tomato,
1.5 cups tomato pasata; return the meat and begin to cook down. After an hour check it and add water as needed. We added half a cup of chicken stock after two hours.
We removed it from the heat and pulled the meat, then returned it for half an hour to the heat.
Meanwhile we began to make our pasts. 1.5 cups of white flour, 2.5 eggs, tablespoon of olive oil and dash of kosher salt.
We kneaded this into dough and set aside wrapped in saran wrap for half an hour. We then formed it into a flat oval and used our pasta maker to roll it out as necessary, making tagliatelle. We set this aside for 10 minutes and then put it in boiling water for 1 minute
then into a pan for quick fry with olive oil and 2 cups of the ragu and dash of garlic; then served with parmesan.
There is a lot of talk today about sheikhs in Hebron who want to for an "emirate" of Hebron. This is being greeted by some as a positive initiative. Let's take a look at the claims and also what the results could be.
First, the context. Israel is engaged in a 637 day war in Gaza against Hamas. Hamas still controls around 40 percent of Gaza. In Gaza, Israel has backed an initiative to have armed militias involved in some activities in the rest of Gaza. There is one named commander, Abu Shabab (not his real name obviously) and there are rumored to be others.
Some see this as a wise decision to have multiple armed gangs and militias run a post-war Gaza. Israel's current government opposes having the PA run Gaza, so the theory is that armed militias fighting eachother and Hamas is a good future.
In the West Bank the PA has been relatively successful at ruling Palestinian cities and towns for thirty years. However, Israel's current government includes parties that oppose the PA. The PA leader Mahmoud Abbas is aging and there is talk of what comes next.
Israel's Ynet says IDF possibly "preparing for a new phase in its campaign against Hamas on Sunday, as heavy airstrikes pounded northern Gaza and military officials weighed a deeper ground maneuver, potentially including a renewed incursion into Gaza City."
Is this the third "new phase" since March 2025? There was one that began on March 1 after the ceasefire fell apart; it truly began on March 18...then another one began after May 5 with Gideon's Chariots. Now, it's June 29...and yet another.
What the report says is a "deeper" maneuver...the IDF has spent the last months basically re-taking buffer areas around Gaza, leaving Hamas in charge of the central camps and Gaza city. 632 days of war and the IDF basically never went into parts of Gaza city or the central camps.
I remember having a conversation with someone a year ago and I'd said that the IDF still needs to defeat Hamas and remove it. They said "but hasn't Israel taken all of Gaza and defeated Hamas"...I had to remind them that, no...the Israeli offensive always leaves Hamas in charge of around half of Gaza. And it's the same a year later.
Iran's targeting of Qatar appears counter intuitive because Doha has generally been the most friendly country toward Tehran in the Gulf. Unlike the tensions that have existed between Saudi Arabia and Bahrain in the past with Iran; and to a lesser extent the UAE; Doha is close to Iran. Al-Udeid US base in Qatar is also just one of MANY US bases in the Gulf; there is also the naval facility in Bahrain, and al-Dhafra in the UAE and sites in Kuwait.
However, on the other hand Iran may assume it has enough political capital built up with Doha, and also cooperation with them in the energy sector; that Iran can do this and climb down after. If Iran focused on Saudi Arabia it could harm the fragile Beijing brokered new relations with Riyadh; it if targeted the UAE this could cause a crisis; also Bahrain could lead to a crisis.
Doha is therefore the least obvious choice. Iran could have targeted Al-Asad base in Iraq, or US bases in Syria, or in the KRG or US naval ships, or many other locations. However, Tehran may have assumed Doha is a kind of safe bet. It could tell Doha before hand what it would do, then there will be a formal complaint but maybe this leads to a deal brokered by Doha and Ankara?
What happened to the Iranian hardliners? Remember back in the era before the JCPOA and also after we were always told that it was important to "empower" the "moderates" in Iran's regime and that if we didn't do everything the regime wanted then the "hardliners" would be empowered? What happened to this fiction?
The narrative of hardliners and moderates was obviously a transparent nonsense designed to cater to the West's need to feel that it can "do X and then Iran will be happy and do Y"...it was sold to the West in a nice package and hundreds of opeds in Western media and commentators employed this paradigm to explain Iran
Notice how Iran's regime never felt it needed to "empower moderates in the US"...or that its behavior, such as attacking Saudi Arabia or Israel or other countries would "empower hardliners." Iran never had to sell itself this fiction because this was a talking point cooked up in the West, probably at a focus-group decades ago, as a way to sell the West, and especially the US, a mythical Iran policy.
In February 2019 Brig. Gen. Hossein Salami, who was then the second-in-command of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, claimed that if a war with Israel took place, then it "will result in Israel’s defeat within three days."