Today's Recipe: Really Good Spaghetti Sauce

Ingredients:

• 1 pound ground beef (optional)
• 8 oz sliced mushrooms
• 1 onion, chopped
• 1 green pepper. chopped
• 2 cloves of garlic
• 2 16-oz cans cut up tomatos
• 1 6-oz can of tomato paste
• 1 spoon sugar
• oregano, basil, thyme
• 6 cups hot cooked spaghetti
• freshly grated Parmesan cheese

Sauce experts like to play up the saucey part of a sauce. They recommend cooking slowly and for a very long time so the ingredients can release all of their flavor into the liquid, giving the sauce a complex but uniform taste. Screw that! I like my vegetables crunchy and fresh, containing their own flavors in their own units. Most of all, I like my spaghetti sauce chunky. And you can't get chunky spaghetti sauce in an American restaurant. So you have to make it yourself.

It goes without saying that spaghetti sauces are meant for combining ingredients of your choice, in amounts to your tastes. This recipe is very similar to one found in Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book, but with beafed up amounts. I like ground beef, but you can easily leave this out for an equally great vegetarian sauce, or use ground pork or turkey. The mushroom, onion and green pepper amounts are higher than the book recommends, which is as it should be; I also like large chunks (chopped but far from diced). Like garlic? Add more garlic. BHaG likes 1 tsp of sugar and each spice; I tend to over-do it, especially the oregano.

The Best Recipe says: "Day in, day out, we find that canned tomatoes make the best sauce." Canned diced tomatoes, in tomato juice, work great for me.

And hey, Cook's Illustrated's The Complete Book of Pasta and Noodles is available for pre-order.

Cook the vegetables in oil. That's a lot of veggies, do it in shifts. Dump into your big fancy wok-shaped covered simmering pan. (I don't know the brand of mine, but I love it; if anyone has any recommendations, please post.) Brown the meat, dump it in. Dump in the cans of tomatoes, dump in the tomato paste. Stir it all together. Add sugar, oregano, basil, thyme, and a bay leaf if you have one. Stir.

Bring the sauce to a boil. Reduce heat, cover. Simmer covered for 30 minutes. Remove the cover and continue to simmer uncovered for 10-15 minutes. Serve over cooked spaghetti noodles.

You can time the noodles pretty well by starting to boil the water 15 minutes into the sauce's cooking, then throw in the noodles when you uncover the sauce. It's important not to overcook spaghetti, and because the uncovered simmering of the sauce can be of a variable amount of time, you can pay attention to the noodles and dinner will be ready when they're done. As you like, use a little salt and extra-virgin olive oil for cooking the noodles.

Prepare the vegetables while you're cooking other vegetables, and you can have Really Good Spaghetti in about an hour. Clean up while simmering and there'll be more time for play after dinner!

I really need a decent digital camera for Dinner and a Weblog. Above, the blue of the television brings up the red in the sauce, an effect I couldn't replicate well with Photoshop in other pictures. I'd be willing to spend a grand on such a camera (though it'd take a while before I can save that much--but it'd be worth it).

Really Good Spaghetti Sauce is great for impressing dates!

Tada! One of my favorite dinners, and it makes enough for three or four days worth of food. You'll clean your plate, even when the noodles are gone. Chunky enough for a sandwich, even.