Simple Spaghetti Sauce

 Here is the recipe Ella used yesterday to make our homemade spaghetti sauce. The important thing to remember is that spaghetti sauce is forgiving. If you don’t have one of these ingredients, no big deal, substitute with something you do have or just leave it out.

Homemade Spaghetti Sauce

• 1 pound mild, sweet or hot italian sausage (ground beef, bison, or lamb would be fine too)
• 1 onion
• 1/2 bulb of garlic peeled and minced or pressed
• 8 mushrooms
• 1 red bell pepper (any color is fine though)
• 4-5 medium sized carrots, peeled and grated
• 2 medium zucchini washed and grated
• 18 oz can crushed tomatoes
• 1 can stewed tomatoes (we use scissors and chop them up in the can)
• 1 can tomato sauce
• 1 can tomato paste
• 1 can diced tomato
• 1 Tbsp sugar (we used organic coconut sugar but any sweetener would be fine)
• 2 bay leaves
• 1 Tbsp italian seasoning
• salt to taste

Saute the first five ingredients in the pressure cooker until meat is cooked (if you are not using the pressure cooker then do this on the stove and transfer to a crock pot), add Tomato paste and stir to incorporate (tomato paste is thick so adding it first makes it easier to stir in). Add the remaining ingredients and stir until blended. Set pressure cooker for 5 min and leave it be. It will build up pressure, cook for 5 min then slowly release the steam and automatically go to warm. Before serving stir, remove bay leaves and add salt as necessary. Sometimes I’ll add garlic salt and parsley at the end to add additional flavor. 

If you have a family of 5 this should get you at least three meals with our family of 8 it gets us at least 2 meals. So after it is cooked, divide the sauce evenly into freezer bags and lay them flat in the freezer. Once they are frozen you can put them on their sides like books on a shelf to save space. This sauce freezes great. When you want your sauce, simply take it out and let it defrost then put in a pot or crock pot to warm it up. This also makes really good pizza topping since it has veggies and meat already in it.