Spaghetti sauce is one of the easiest things to learn how to cook. It is very easy to make a fantastic spaghetti sauce at home that you can use for one meal and then freeze for a future meal. When we decided to stop relying on restaurant food, spaghetti was one of the first things we learned how to make properly. My husband lived for several years on the east coast and watched some real Italians make spaghetti sauce. I’m going to share our recipe below and then link to a good demonstration on YouTube.  There are a few things that you need know about authentic Italian sauces.  First, real Italian pasta sauces have vegetables like celery, onions, and carrots. There are a few store bought sauces that have these vegetables (i.e. Del Grosso) but most do not and are very salty. Also, Italian sauces tend to use a variety of meat rather than just hamburger meat. In fact, ground beef is not as common in Italy as in America. They use a lot of lamb, pork, and veal in Italy because they don’t have much room to herd cattle. My recipe is a little bit mine, a little bit my husband and a little bit Mario Batali.

Kerri’s Spaghetti Sauce

3 tablespoons of olive oil

1 tablespoon dried basil (fresh in the summer time)

1 tablespoon dried thyme

1 tablespoon sea salt

5 cloves of garlic (minced)

1 small red onion (diced)

1/2 rib of celery (diced)

1 small carrot (diced)

1/2 cup of Italian flat leaf parsley

1/2 cup of red wine (the type good enough to drink)

1 lb Honeysuckle White ground turkey (or ground pork)

2 cans of crushed tomatoes (14.5 oz)

1/2 cup water or broth

1 8 oz can tomato paste

Heat pan on medium low heat with olive oil.  Place all vegetables, herbs and seasonings in the pan. Cook for about 5 minutes and then add meat. Cook until browned. Pour in wine and simmer for a few minutes. Add crushed tomatoes, tomato paste, and water or broth. Simmer covered on low for at least an hour. We love to make this sauce in the crockpot and let it cook on low all day long.  Check the taste of this sauce mid-way through simmering to make sure it is seasoned properly and to make sure it has the consistency you prefer. For thicker sauce, omit the water, for thinner sauce you may add a little more broth.  Be careful with the salt as the tomatoes generally are salted in the can.

Tags: Cooking at Home

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 12th, 2009 at 2:47 pm and is filed under Freezer Ideas, Home Cooking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.