Overnight Spaghetti Sauce

In this Italian-American town, the holidays include the usual fare: ham and turkey, sweet potatoes, pies... but they also include sauce. Lots and lots of sauce.

Now there are hundreds of ways to make spaghetti sauce. And there are multiple varieties of ready-made sauces at the grocery--many of which are quite good. But when I know I'm going to need a lot of sauce, I like to make it myself, slow-cooked in either the crock pot or a 250*F oven overnight. Here's how:

Mrs.W's Overnight Sausage and Meatball Spaghetti Sauce

Ingredients

- 1 6-pound can of tomato sauce (not spaghetti sauce--just tomato sauce, or tomato puree if you prefer)

- 4 basil ice cubes (or about 1/4 cup packed fresh chopped basil leaves)

- 3 pounds meatballs (combine ground beef or turkey with 1/2 tsp salt, 1/2 tsp dried oregano, 1/4 tsp dried basil, 1/2 cup grated parmesan cheese and lightly work together with a fork. Don't mash or squish. Gently form meatballs--about 1-1/2 ounces--and pan-fry in olive oil.)

- 1/2 cup leftover caponata (optional; I use this for added veg and flavor)

- 2 pounds medium-hot italian sausage, cut into 2-inch sections (I prefer the reduced-fat pork sausage. You need some pork to make this sauce taste just right.)

- 1 large onion, chopped fine

- 6 cloves garlic, minced

- splash spicy vinegar from my container of home-pickled sliced cherry peppers (optional; may substute a couple teaspoons of crushed cherry peppers from a jar, or a good sprinkle of dried chile flakes plus a splash of white vinegar or any leftover wine you might have; balsamic vinegar is good here)

Procedure

Fill a large oven-safe pot or crock pot up to two-thirds full with sauce. Add basil ice cubes, fried meatballs and caponata.

In a large saucepan set over medium heat, pan-fry sausage pieces in a little olive oil to brown on all sides and render out some of their grease. As they get browned on all sides, add to your pot of sauce.

If you use low-fat sausage like I do, you won't have a whole lot of that grease--and we'll use it later. If you use regular-fat pork sausage, keep only two or three tablespoons of the grease and discard the rest.

Fry onions in the sausage grease, adding a little olive oil if needed. When onions are transparent, add garlic and saute until fragrant, about 1 minute. Immediately ladle in some sauce from your pot to soak up all the goodness from the pan, scraping the bottom of the pan to release any browned bits.

Pour everything from saucepan into sauce. If there's any room left in your pot, add more sauce from the giant can. (I had only a few cups left, so I poured it into a freezer bag with the last basil ice cube for future use.) Cover and place in 250*F oven or set crock pot to low for eight hours.

The result: full-flavored sauce with tender meatballs and sausage chunks.

Why don't I add salt? Because that sausage is salty and flavors the whole pot of sauce after eight hours of cooking. Depending on what you use, you'll want to taste and adjust seasonings to your liking.

This sauce can be distributed into meal-size portions in freezer bags and frozen. This is certainly a frugal alternative to those jars of ready-made sauce from the grocery store.

Tomorrow is another Man-Food Sunday, so I'll be using most of this entire batch... come back Monday for another installment of Man Food!

Waiter! There's something in my...

Believe it or not, after a horrid, rainy, drizzly, disgusting morning, the sun decided to shine and warm up my little patch of earth this afternoon.

Even so, I realized that I had some tomatoes that were about to go beyond their shelf life. As I began to grate them to make a homemade ketchup, I remembered this month's "Waiter! There's something in my... savory preserves!" event hosted by Johanna of The Passionate Cook.

Yay! I've been wanting to enter a WTSIM event for a while now! Click here to view the roundup for this event.

So here it is... my savory preserve. Spicy Italian Ketchup.




Making ketchup is basically just reducing a sauce to an almost paste-like consistency. With some tomatoes on the windowsill bursting at the peak of freshness, today was the perfect day to make just that.

As a diabetic, it's hard to find tasty condiments that are not loaded with added sugar or... *gasp* the dreaded high fructose corn syrup. So I find it's easier to just make my own--then I can make it taste any way I like.

I was raised in a small Italian-American town, so it's understandable that my tastebuds tend toward italian flavors--basil, oregano, olive oil, tomatoes, garlic and onion. The flavors all blend together to bring me back home, no matter where I've lived or traveled in the world. And, well, spicy is a must in my house.

So my ketchup is just that--spicy and full of italian flavor. It's great on anything, from eggs to french fries (though I don't indulge in those too often these days), and unlike store-bought ketchup, this can be used almost like a sofrito, to season other dishes with a burst of tomatoey italian flavor.

Here's the recipe:


Spicy Italian Ketchup

Ingredients

olive oil
2 cloves garlic, peeled and chopped
1 teaspoon chopped yellow onion (I used one small boiler onion)
4 ripe tomatoes, grated over large holes of box grater, skins discarded
1 tablespoon chopped fresh basil (I used a basil ice cube)
1/4 teaspoon kosher salt
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
pinch dried oregano
1/2 cup red wine
2 teaspoons crushed red cherry peppers (these were home-grown red cherry peppers that I chopped and stored in white distilled vinegar in the fridge)

Directions

1. Heat a drizzle of olive oil in a medium saucepan; saute onion until translucent. Add garlic and saute 1 minute--be careful not to burn the garlic.

2. Add grated tomatoes with their seeds & juice (okay, if you want to take the time to strain out the seeds you may. I'm just too lazy for that) with remaining ingredients. Bring to a simmer over medium heat, and continue to simmer, stirring frequently, until liquid is reduced to 1/3 the original amount.

3. Remove sauce from heat and empty into a tall container. Puree using an immersion blender until fairly smooth. This only takes a few seconds. Return sauce to saucepan and return to a simmer over medium heat and continue to reduce until almost all liquid is gone and you have a ketchup-like consistency. Remove from heat and cool 5 minutes.

4. Pour sauce into a clean glass jar (with a metal spoon to keep glass from cracking). Float a little olive oil over the top and seal the lid. When fully cooled, store in the refrigerator.


I keep this in the refrigerator for about 3 weeks. Note that I do not process the jar--hence the time limit to use this stuff up. If you want to make a larger batch and process, go for it. Or it could be frozen in a plastic freezer-safe container.

Whoo-hoo that IS spicy... and my tongue is tingling! You have to try this if you love a spicy tomato condiment!

Bye for now,
Mrs.W