Pizza! (part 2)

Finally!

As promised!

The pasta sauce recipe I use!

This sauce is delicious. I eat a little pasta with my sauce if I can get away with it. I got this recipe from Sandy Panagos years ago in a cookbook she helped put together for me as a wedding present.

Pasta Sauce

• 3T oil
• 2 cloves (or more) garlic (I use the whole bulb in my stockpot full of sauce.)
• 1 pound ground beef (omit if you are making pizza sauce)
• 1/2 c. chopped onion
• 1/2 c. green peppers (not in original recipe, but we like green peppers in our sauce)
• 28oz. can diced tomatoes
• 6 oz can tomato paste
• 15 oz can tomato sauce
• 1/2 tsp. oregano
• 1/2 tsp. basil
• 1 tsp. salt
• 1/2 tsp pepper (I omit; I don’t like the flavor of pepper in my sauce.)
• 1 T. sugar (I omit; fresh tomatoes have enough sweet to offset the bitter you get from cooking them. That said, if my sauce is coming out bitter, I add some sugar to taste.)
• 1 T. dried parsley

Brown garlic, onion, green peppers, and beef in oil. Add remaining ingredients. Simmer until thick. Serve with 14-16oz package cooked noodles of choice.

This is fairly self explanatory, though what foodie post would be complete without pictures?

I cook my onions and green peppers until they are done. This only takes a few minutes. It takes longer to cut them up than it does to cook them. Sometimes I add my spices to this mixture and sometimes I add them with the tomatoes. It depends on if I’m using fresh or dried spices (fresh I run through the blender with the tomatoes).

I usually run the garlic cloves in the tomatoes. I used to use a press for it all the time, but when you are pressing a bulb at a time, this gets tedious.

I don’t seed or peel the tomatoes since I’m freezing it. It doesn’t seem to change the texture or flavor at all. I’ve read that you’d need to do both if you were to can it. Also, we can only get Roma tomatoes here. They tend to have a lower water content and tender skins so that might also make a difference.

I leave my tomatoes a tad chunky since that’s how I like it. 😉

Once the pan is full you let it simmer for a couple hours. First it looks like this:

light red, bubbly, thin. 

As it cooks, the bubbles turn to foam.

It’s getting there, but it still isn’t quite done. Just keep simmering and stirring.

The finished sauce is deep red (even without food coloring), thick, and fragrant.

Now you’re ready to top your pizza! (Or you can just eat the sauce out of the pan with a spoon. That’ll work, too. 😉 )

Find the crust post here and the first part of the sauce post here.