Bulk Cooking / OAMC / Freezer recipe:

The best spaghetti sauce ever (and cheap too!)

 
I delved into another batch of bulk cooking last night. We used up the last of our previous batch of spaghetti sauce so I “engineered” a new batch. To me engineering and cooking are very similar, they both require a lot of common sense, a lot a creative impulses and a sense for what will work.

Anyway, this is probably my 5th bulk batch of spaghetti sauce. By spaghetti sauce I really mean use for any pasta application meat and tomato sauce. I originally started it for spaghetti, but we use it with rotini noodles, baked ziti, bowtie noodles, elbow noodles… you name it… always tastes good. All in all the finished batch took me about 20 minutes of prep, fed the two of us two servings of pasta each with the yummy meat sauce and still made enough to freeze 6 more meal servings which will feed the two of us for supper 6 times. The best part is it warms up just as yummy, takes less time than the noodles boiling and yields a great home cooked meal with all natural ingredients that you can pronounce. No fillers like soy something or other. No preservatives that are 8 syllables long. Just words like beef, mushrooms, tomatoes… things like that. LOL.

Anyway, here’s the skinny…

Spray roasting pan w/no stick spray

Start the oven preheating to 400*F

Dump a 5 Lb tube of ground meat in there

Chop up some celery and dump it in there

Chop up some mushrooms and dump it in there

Chop up some green peppers and dump it in there

Chop up some onion and dump it in there

mix it up really good and put the roaster in the oven to bake for 50 minutes, go watch TV or something (like read my blog)
Notice the herbs and seasonings… That’s right, there are none. The veggies provide more than enough seasonings when baking, you don’t need a single seasoning. Try it first, if you want to put seasoning in, do it next time.

50 minutes later…

Take out the roaster and drain the grease really good … ok then don’t, see if I care.
Chop up the meat mix as you prefer

Dump in 3 cans of stewed tomatoes

Dump in 3 cans of tomato sauce
Dump in about 1 cup of brown sugar
Mix it up and put the roasterback in the oven for 10 minutes to simmer

This would be a good time to boil noodles if you plan on eating in 10 minutes, LOL.

10 minutes later…

 

 

 

 

 

Remove roaster from the oven and taste test. If you find it’s too tomato tasting, put a little more brown sugar in to balance out the acidity.

Last step, plate up and pig out. Put the left overs in containers in the freezer. We usually get one meal right away out of it and about 7-10 more freezer meals (enough for 2 people plus leftover lunches the next day).This has to be the simplest meat sauce I have ever made and it has to be the most wonderful and delicious as well. Funny how that works out.