Shelley's Favorite Spaghetti Sauce

By fuzzygroup

As a way of addressing the “social costs of entrepreneurship”*, I try to cook most if not all of the meals in our househould. I love to cook anyway so its not a big deal for me and I find that I solve many of my technical problems while I’m cooking. I’m the kind of geek that drags one of his laptops into the kitchen and cooks while reading my aggregator so its actually a fairly productive time for me.

Now if you’re a husband who cooks — or a wife that cooks — every so often your spouse says “Hey! This is really, really good” and then you have to write it down. So here goes:

Spaghetti with Meat Sauce

Note: This is a chunky tomato sauce with ground beef that’s sweet. Its not an overly acidic sauce; the sugar prevents the tomato taste from being too sharp / acidic.

Quantity Produced: This makes enough for a family of 4+. I strongly recommend serving it with homemade garlic bread which I’ll blog a recipe for shortly.
Ingredients:

Ingredients

• 1 can 28 ounce Red Gold Diced Tomatos
• 2 cans 15 ounce Red Gold Tomato Sauce
• 1 can 6 ounce Red Gold Tomato Paste
• 3 to 5 portobello mushrooms broken into tip of the finger sized pieces
• 1 pound or 454 grams Laura’s Organic Beef; sorry that’s the only bit of the metric system I generally remember save “39.4 inches per meter”
• 1/2 onion coarsely diced
• 2 tablespoons dried basil; bonus points for fresh basil
• 1 tablespoon dried oregano
• 2 tablespoons sugar
• 1 teaspoon garlic powder
• 1 tablespoon minced garlic
• 2 tablespoons Olive Oil; I prefer Extra Virgin, First Cold Press, Whatever is Cheapest with those Words

Preparation

Step 1

Process

1. Brown the beef and the onions in a large pot until done; remove to glass bowl large enough to hold the sauce for serving
2. Drain 96% (i.e. almost all of it) of the oil from the beef and add the minced garlic and olive oil
3. Saute the minced garlic until brown but not burnt; this step is to “flavor” the oil
4. Add the Red Gold tomato products, beef/onion mixture and mushrooms
5. Bring to a boil
6. Add the dried spices and sugar
7. Cook for 1.5 to 2 hours on setting 2 or 3 stirring every so often ; I set the kitchen timer on 10 minutes and walk back to stir it whenever I hear the timer go off