Week 5 runs on a single large pot of bolognese — 6 to 8 cups of it. That’s enough for two nights of rigatoni plus the stuffed peppers later in the week. It really does carry you. That’s why this page portions the sauce by the person rather than telling you to empty the pot: measure ¾ cup a head and the sauce stretches exactly as far as it’s meant to.
A meat sauce needs somewhere to go. Rigatoni is a wide tube with ridges cut into it, so the ragu packs inside the tube and grips the outside — every piece arrives carrying sauce and bits of beef. Long thin strands can only ever wear a coating, which is why a good bolognese on spaghetti always leaves a pile of meat sitting at the bottom of the bowl. In Bologna they serve it with tagliatelle for the same reason: broad and rough beats round and slick.
Toss the pasta and sauce together before it reaches the bowl rather than spooning sauce onto a mound of bare noodles. The pasta comes off the heat still absorbing, and a minute spent combining is what gets flavor into the rigatoni instead of just onto it. It also means nobody gets the sauceless serving from the bottom of the pot.
If there’s a wedge left over from the previous week’s cooking, this is the dish that finishes it. Grate it fresh at the table rather than ahead — pre-grated Parmesan dries out within the hour and loses most of what you paid for.