Skip to main content

Homemade Spaghetti Sauce


With tomato season in full force, we are working hard to eat up our tomatoes.  I canned a few more quarts of tomatoes as we made a batch of apple butter last weekend.


As you can see, some of the apple butter will be holiday gifts.


Apple butter is such an old fashioned-type food so a lot of people are thrilled to get it.   Have you ever bought apple butter at the store?  Exactly.  Sometimes I'll just take some over to people's house when I visit with a loaf of Old Fashioned White bread  from Great Harvest Bakery which is the perfect match for our apple butter.  We couldn't let our canning season go by without making more apple butter.  I also couldn't let all these tomatoes go into quart jars without making some spaghetti sauce so last weekend we had spaghetti with homemade spaghetti sauce.  I love fall!

I thought this would be a good first dinner for my sister-in-law who was driving here from Montana on a road trip visiting friends and relatives.  She was scheduled to arrive about 4:00 pm so in the morning, I picked this many tomatoes and brought them in...about 3-4 pounds.


I cleaned them the same way as canning tomatoes until my sink looked like this.
The result was a pot of tomato chunks.

The chunks will cook down to a good consistency throughout the day as it simmers slowly but first I added some oregano and basil from the garden.


Chop the basil and oregano finely and add 3-4 Tbsp. of the fresh herbs to the pot of tomatoes.

I was almost ready to start the simmering process put first there were a few more ingredients I wanted to add to my spaghetti sauce.


You can add any ingredients you want but my favorites are onions, garlic and Italian sausage.  So, first I sautéed one onion and 4-5 cloves of garlic in a little olive oil.


When they become translucent, add to the pot of tomatoes.


Next, cook 1 pound of Italian sausage over medium heat.  I like to use organic, chicken Italian sausage, there is hardly any fat in it so you don't have any fat to pour off.  If you use meat with fat, pour off any of fat.  You don't want spaghetti sauce with fat floating on top.


Now, you can add your meat to the sauce but save the pan for your next ingredient... mushrooms.



I like a few mushrooms in my spaghetti sauce so sauté mushrooms and add them to your pot of tomatoes.



Your pot of tomatoes has now turned into spaghetti sauce and after it simmers all day, it will look like this.


Now, all you have to do is make a nice salad


with lots of cucumbers from the garden, of course,


and some bread sticks to top it off.


    Bon Appetit!
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Trader Joe's Gluten-Free Oatmeal, Peanut Butter and Chocolate Chip Cookies

I don't have very many gluten-free cookies on my blog because quite frankly, I usually don't like gluten-free.  But occasionally, I do find a good recipe and this is one that is from the back of the Trader Joe's oatmeal and it's a good one.  My friend brought some over to our house last weekend when Nick and family were here for our birthday celebrations  and we all loved them. My friend lives a few blocks away and we walk the neighborhood together on weekends.  We can easily go 5 miles in no time, talking non-stop.  She loves exploring our neighborhood as much as I do and we discover so many favorite little spots.  We even found a property with a horse (or more like a pony, I should say.)   The views are always quite lovely, too.  Bruce and I had our thirty-ninth wedding anniversary on July 18th and I made a point of walking past the house where we had our wedding reception.  I told my friend, "Thirty-nine years ago today, t...
3 comments
Read more

Meatloaf by Mark Bittman

Once again, I turned on the television yesterday and saw that Mark Bittman was on the Today show and was making his version of  meatloaf .  This must be meatloaf season.  It was surprisingly similar to the  Pioneer Woman's version  who was also recently on.   I was a little surprised of his version because Mark Bittman is into healthy eating and has lost a lot of weight and improved his health by changing his diet which he writes about in his book,  Food Matters .  His meatloaf recipe also included bacon and cheese!  I must be doing something wrong.  The thing to remember, which he writes about in his book, is that you can eat healthy without going extreme or changing your whole life.    If you don't know who Mark Bittman is, he is a food writer and a four star chef with multiple cookbooks who loves to eat but changed his food philosophy to improve his health.  He tells his story in Food Matters and provides ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Top Pot Doughnuts

I just returned from another weekend in Seattle and for the first time, I actually went to a Top Pot Doughnut shop.  I've had their doughnuts before because they serve them at Starbuck's and I've seen their shops in Seattle when I visit because there is now one right across the street from our old house in Wedgwood.   Now, our daughter, lives in another old neighborhood of mine on Capitol Hill and right around the corner from her house is a Top Pot. There were not eateries like this in my old neighborhoods when I lived in Seattle.  And our daughter literally lives steps away from my old house on Capitol Hill where I lived when I was her age.  There are so many more luxuries and temptations lurking around the corner in Seattle neighborhoods more so than when I lived there but I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing.  Being that I'm one that mostly gives in to temptation, it's probably a good thing they didn't exist when I lived there. ...
Post a Comment
Read more