>>757 I sometimes use half and half beef and pork mince. If so I don't bother with pancetta (and - hangs head - I do sometimes use bacon, but you can get unsmoked belly bacon here, so it is quite similar to pancetta, except that it is usually cut too thin for this purpose).

>>756 Very fine dice should be easy for a newly married woman - please tell me you had a Magimix on your wedding list?

>>761 That is a beef mince stew with carrots. It does tend to suggest that as a generality his fans don't cook much. For any sauce of this type I would take it as read that you dice the veg finely. This is why old cookery books like Julia Child are light relative to the enormous numbers of recipes in them, whereas you could fell an ox with one of Nigella's tomes. Longer instructions needed. BTW on the Great British Bake Off, they use short form recipes for the technical challenge. The skill lies in knowing how to fill in the gaps as much as anything.