Homemade Spaghetti Sauce

So I mentioned in my last post that I made a homemade spaghetti sauce. I loosely followed a recipe by Cooking Light but to be honest it was more of a “general guideline”. This was my first time making spaghetti sauce, and it turned out well except for one tiny detail (I’ll explain later!).

This sauce was spawned out of a desire to not eat stupid Prego sauce. There’s nothing wrong with it, but I just felt like I couldn’t handle the blandness anymore. I had a can of crushed tomatoes, and armed with my Cooking Light Way to Cook: The Complete Visual Guide to Everyday Cooking I found a recipe that seemed easy enough! The recipe called for fresh tomatoes, but you make do with what you have!

Tomato Sauce
Adapted from Cooking Light Way to Cook: The Complete Visual Guide to Everyday Cooking

Ingredients:

• 3/4 of a 28-oz can of crushed tomatoes (really just however much you think you need!)
• pinch of crushed red pepper
• little bit of water (depends on how “saucy” you like your sauce, or if you like it a bit more watery)
• pinch of oregano
• pinch of thyme
• pinch of sea salt
• 2 cloves of garlic, minced
• 1 tbsp of olive oil
• cooked ground beef (however much you want)

Directions:

1. Heat a sauce pan on medium-low heat. Add olive oil. Once olive oil is heated, add the minced garlic and cook until browned (very lightly! Don’t burn it!).
2. Once the garlic is cooked, add the can of tomato sauce. Add enough sauce so that there’s enough sauce for how many people you’re serving. (I only needed 3/4 of the can). If you want left overs, make the whole can! Add a little water if you need to.
3. Add the crushed red pepper (I added a lot, I like the heat), thyme, oregano, and sea salt. Add the beef.
4. Allow the sauce to simmer for 10-15 minutes! Then put on top of some pasta and have some delicious sauce!

Really this is just a sauce I made for fun, and it turned out well. I didn’t measure any ingredients except for sea salt… Which is what went HIDEOUSLY wrong. 😦 Like I said, I loosely followed the recipe from Cooking Light which called for 2 tbsps of sea salt (SO MUCH SALT). So I put it 1/2 tbsp of sea salt. Which was way too much. I realized immediately after I put it in unfortunately. However! I read online that if you have potatoes you can just slice them up (after washing) and put them into sauces/soups that are too salty because the potato will just soak up the salt! This improved the salt a LOT but it was still pretty salty and we were too impatient (i.e. the spaghetti was cooked already).

It was actually kind of hilarious though because the sauce tasted so good at first but as you continued to eat it, it got saltier and saltier until it felt like your mouth was just salt haha. I went running later and I felt like I had licked salt haha. So consider yourself warned! But educated on how to get rid of excess saltiness. 🙂

I’ll definitely make this again. It was so easy because you could basically whip it up while the spaghetti cooked.