Best Conference Sunday Activity

Decided to use my hours at home on Sunday to cook up my first pot of spaghetti sauce after the manner of the Frankies cookbook.

First I slowly cooked a bunch of garlic in olive oil for ten minutes or so, adding a generous pinch of red pepper flakes in the last minute.  I made a half-recipe and the only thing I would have done differently was use much less than 1/2 of the required olive oil.  Definitely had too much.

While that was goldening up I crushed (by hand, which is fun) two 28oz. cans of whole tomatoes.

And then I put the tomatoes in the pot with the oil and garlic.  See how much oil there is?  Gross, right?  I skimmed as much as I could (which was plenty, I'm not an ineffective skimmer) as I cooked.

And then I just simmered that stuff for four hours.  Here we are two hours in:

With 40 minutes left on the clock I fried up three Italian sausages, when they were about cooked I cranked up the heat to give them a bit of a sear.

And then I put the sausage in the sauce to simmer for the last half hour of cooking.  It might not look like much, but this sauce came together real nice.  Super simple, the main ingredient was time and the taste . . . just so right.  Really there's no reason in the world to be buying spaghetti sauce at all.

And here's how the sauce looked on my spaghetti noodles.  Trust on this, this was some delicious spaghetti and I have So! Much! Sauce! leftover in the fridge (just as I had planned).

Like I said above, I was kind of following the red sauce recipe in the Frankies Spuntino cookbook with this little effort.  If you want a simple yet beautiful cookbook full of knowledge you can apply to all your cooking, Italian or otherwise, then please, may I recommend this cookbook to you.  Check it.