Hello from my kitchen! Today is Monday. The first day of Vassalboro Community School’s being closed for the next two weeks for the coronavirus and I am preparing lunch. David had to go to school today. The teachers had to go in and prepare for the shutdown. I thought I would take a moment and put something positive out there so I thought I would share with you my personal favorite marinara Italian style spaghetti sauce.
I start by chopping onions & green bell peppers. I’m also going to add some fresh carrots. I want to share my favorite types of tomatoes with you. I am NOT trying to make a cooking show (although, that idea may be entertained) I’m trying to give us something else to consider in what’s gonna happen over these next two weeks.
I love to eat. I love to cook. Fortunately, David loves my cooking and he likes to eat as well! I like to eat good food. We’ve done our best to go vegan this year, starting in January so I’m letting you know that peppers and onions and carrots have become my staple ingredients-I forgot the celery-for just about everything that I cook. They can be used in soups and stews, and added to your spaghetti sauce. Not sure who needs to know that.
I picked up this can of Italian tomatoes recently at Hannaford’s for $8 and some change. San Marzano tomatoes and they’re absolutely the best canned tomatoes that you can get, from Italy (in my opinion). Another favorite brand – Tuttorosso – I usually get these with the no salt added. Anytime that I can, I get no salt added because David has high blood pressure and we are trying to work with him on getting that blood pressure down so the no salt added canned products is really important. Going vegan is another thing that’s important to us so when we’re reading labels we’re looking for making sure that there is no sugar, when at all possible. Because tomatoes are a fruit it has natural sugars but I’m looking for anytime I can to get a under two grams in a serving, from a product that is canned.
These are flavored diced tomatoes. I go to the grocery store and I look for what’s on sale. Considering seasonings are already in this, it’s really easy to make a great spaghetti sauce! This one is basil, garlic, and oregano.
Something to think about – the type of food you’re making your sauce for. Do you want it to be Italian or are you cooking Mexican? Mexican seasonings are (slightly) different than Italian but some of them do overlap. Basil, garlic & onion overlap (& French).
These are a new personal favorite – fire-roasted tomatoes – this product alone, if you were to do nothing except combine these two items – you potentially want two small cans with one large can – if you did nothing else, it’s fantastic! Try it! You could make a wonderful meal! (can drop! LOL…there’s no editing on this…it’s just me talking to you guys).
Here’s another product I love – Rotel diced tomatoes! This particular can is a new label – the Mexican style lime & cilantro. I wouldn’t put this into my Italian spaghetti sauce but I decided to pull these cans out of my pantry because that’s basically the premise of this talk – to help share my spaghetti sauce recipe with you. This happened to be in there. They also come in a variety of green chilies & levels of heat, so for Mexican, these are my favorite.
The other product that I like to add, which adds a different level, is roasted red peppers. They’re fire-roasted red peppers and something that I learned about recently from being vegan because they use them in one of our favorite vegan noncheese recipes.
The flavor comes from the roasted red peppers. You can add these to your spaghetti sauce and again it adds a level of flavor that you wouldn’t get otherwise. Garlic, garlic powder, onion powder, basil & oregano are the four seasonings that I use and pretty much if you want to add other vegetables… like recently we used a bag of green beans, carrots and I forget what else was in it. It was frozen green beans, wax beans & carrots added to the spaghetti sauce.
So I hope I’ve inspired you.
I’m going to make the sauce now. I’ll take some pictures and post (FB) the pictures along with this video and would love it if y’all (y’all – that’s my southern training there) if you guys would share my post & in the comments put your own recipes to support lots of cooking since that’s what’s gonna happen over the next couple of weeks since we are all gonna be at home and wondering what to do with our pantry!
Feel free to ask me questions because I do a lot of cooking. That’s just four ingredients. I know I held up eight fingers but I do do a ton of cooking with just four ingredients and if you tell me what you have for pantry items, I can help you find a recipe to match!
Anyway, Happy Spring everybody! St. Paddy’s day is tomorrow. David will be home in a little while. I’m gonna make the spaghetti sauce and share the pictures and this video online (FB) and I hope everyone stays healthy!
Will talk to you soon…ciao for now!