the Love We Make

Before I get in too deep into this recipe I will tell you that I have a secret step, the makes my sauce perfect, and it is one a STRONGLY recommend against doing. Simply put, it goes against every safe food handling step ever... BAD BAD IDEA.

Gather Ingredients:
3 cloves of garlic.
Oregano
Basil
half of Red Onion
Shred some carrot
Olive Oil
about pound or so, of ground Beef, Turkey, or Pork.
Red Wine, hearty, and decent, not some garbage. if it's not good enough to drink by itself, it's not good enough for your cooking.
8 ounces of Tomato Sauce
4 ounces of Tomato Paste

Take the garlic cloves, lie flat, and with the flat of your knife on top of them, pound them once, with your heel of your hand. This first step makes taking the skins off, easily.

Garlic Cloves

Finely chop garlic, and dice up the red onion. give them both a good fine chop.

Heat up a few teaspoons of olive oil over medium heat. Add the garlic and onion. Keep string every once and a while. Simmer and begin the next step, but remember: DONT Let ONION and GARLIC burn! Just a nice toasty brown color.

Add the meat to your garlic, and onion in the pan, and brown.

I use either ground turkey, beef, or pork. Lately, mostly ground Turkey as it's a little bit better for me. Again, stir occasionally, and use the back of a wooden spoon to break up the meat, and let it brown. When I add the meat, I also add the oregano, and basil. For me, I tend to use the stuff I picked last fall, that I have been drying over winter. For some reason in sauces, I like using my dried herbs. While the beef is browning, time for....

Shred some carrot. Give it a nice shred... you want both the sweetness and texture. So nothing too fine.

Sauce, simmering and simmering!

Stir in the Carrot.
Finally, pour in Tomato Sauce, Tomato Paste, and Add a Cup of a hearty Red Wine.
I usually start my sauces about lunch time and let them simmer all day. in fact, there are times when I amke the sauce the day before and let it simmer off and on, all day.

DO NOT DO THIS NEXT STEP... IT'S BAD and WRONG...!

Any of you who follow me, or hear me Thursday's in The Ramble, on #PYPT @PYPT will know I always talk about food. and often I say, Food Is Love. I mean that, quite literally some days.


I think back, and my pasta red gravy is one of the oldest, and probably first foods I ever really learned to cook on my own. I remember being 8 or 9 and being in the kitchen seeing my grandmother doing some basic sort of this recipe. Along the way, depending on what was left over, it got ground up and added to the sauce... or chopped or, simply tossed in. Any veggie, or leftover meat, chopped and added. mom cooked the same way...

DO NOT DO THIS NEXT STEP... I MEAN IT, IT'S BAD and WRONG...!

After we were done with dinner and the gravy/sauce cooled, it would go into the freezer, to be reused. And the next time we made sauce, we started with whatever was leftover and frozen. Some part of each batch was literally leftover and frozen from last time.



This is bad,. Safe food handling, one doesn't constantly freeze, reheat, freeze, reheat, over and over, for literally decades.
I like to think somewhere in the sauce I made tonight, is bits and pieces my mother, and her mom, my Yia Yia before me, cooked. It's wrong and bad, and I know it. I thought it and said loudly, as I put the sauce into a container and slipped it inside the freezer...... said much the same when, at lunch today, I brought out a frozen container of sauce, from last time. Some part of this sauce tonight, was part of a sauce my grandmother made, 30 plus years ago... and 10 plus years ago my mom made sauce, and a few years ago, with both my daughters at my side, cooking, and the first week I was married, and tonight.