SPAGHETTI SAUCE

The tomato crop this year from our garden was plentiful. You can only eat so many tomatoes or give them to friends to enjoy. Each year I usually make salsa, freeze whole and chopped up tomatoes and make tomato sauce which I also freeze. This year I decided to make spaghetti sauce with italian sausage. With the amount of red tomatoes ready to be used, I decided to make a large batch of sauce and went shopping for some ingredients today. I went to my favourite italian grocery store and bought three pounds of medium spiced homemade sausage.

After washing about 30 or so tomatoes of varying sizes, I put them in a blender in batches and puree them. This was a lot of tomatoes and I knew that my cooking adventure would require two large soup pots to make the spaghetti sauce. The puree of tomatoes was poured into the pots and simmered for about 75 minutes as I wanted to concentrate the puree before making the sauce. Once the puree was reduced enough I added the following ingredients. This list of ingredients is for one large pot of sauce. I doubled the ingredients as I made two large pots.

2 tbsp olive oil

4 cloves of garlic minced

1 large onion chopped

1 red pepper chopped

6 mushrooms chopped

1 small can of tomato sauce

1/2 cup of red wine

2 tbsp sugar or splenda

1 tbsp dried basil

1 tbsp dried oregano

600 to 700 grams of medium italian sausage

1. Heat olive oil in a large frying pan and saute onions and garlic. After a few minutes add the red pepper and mushrooms to the pan. Saute for another five minutes. Add this mixture to the pot of tomatoes.

2. Cook the sausages in the frying pan until they are cooked. Let them cool for a few minutes and chop them into small pieces on a cutting board. Add to the sauce.

3. Add the remaining ingredients to the sauce. Usually I use cooking wine instead of drinking wine but today I had some red wine left from another supper and I used it.

4. Simmer for about an hour or so and add more seasonings to taste if you want.

The spaghetti sauce turned out really well. I was unsure about adding the red wine but I was pleased I did. As the sausage had a medium level of heat, it gave the sauce more flavour and the spices in the sausage helped with the subtle flavours. From the work today I made enough spaghetti sauce for ten meals.