Red Sauce

In my freezer cooking ventures with my friend Amy one of the books we've used a few times (Fix, Freeze, Feast) has a recipe for red sauce that I decided to give a try.  One month we were making several meals that needed red sauce and I didn't really want to buy the pre-made stuff so I just gave this recipe a whirl and loved it (I did change the amount of spices because I always like more and added my own special ingredient).  This is all I ever use now!  You can use it anywhere that you'd use a red sauce.

Matt loves a good old fashioned spaghetti with meat sauce so that's where I use it the most.  This recipe is plenty for our family for two meals plus leftovers so I usually make a batch to eat half and freeze half.

For spaghetti I brown a pound of ground sausage (you could use ground beef but sausage is so yummy!) and then add the sauce.  Today I actually browned the meat at lunch time and put the meat and all of the sauce ingredients into the crockpot to simmer for the afternoon.  That worked really well.

Red Sauce - makes about 10 cups

Ingredients:
1 (12 ounce) can tomato paste
2 c hot water
1 (28 ounce) can tomato sauce
1 (28 ounce) can diced tomatoes 
2 T dried parsley
2 T minced onion
1 T minced garlic (about 9 cloves)
1 T sugar
2 t salt
1/2 T dried basil
1 t dried oregano
1 t dried thyme
Special ingredient - 1-2 T Pure Maple syrup (you don't need this but if you're used to a sweet sauce it really makes a difference. I read this tip somewhere and think it really works. I bet you could even leave out the sugar from the original recipe and just add extra syrup)


Directions:
Mix tomato paste and hot water in a large bowl until smooth.  Stir in everything else and stir well.  DO NOT need to cook.  Use in your recipe, and/or divide into containers to freeze for later use.