Ingredients

-2 cans of store bought tomatoes or about 15-20 large tomatoes or 40 -50 small tomatoes. I use smaller Roma tomatoes and they are very, very small. (that’s what grows in my garden). Let them get very well vine ripened.

2 large onions. ( 1 or less if you don’t like onions, I"m an onion freak).

2 med carrots, peeled and chopped.

1/3 cup of parsley - although I missed it for this particular recipe.

5 garlic cloves. (although today I’m missing the cloves so I’m using powder - I suck, but it works)

1 large green pepper

1 large chili pepper (if you like spicy, use this, if not, skip it completely).

1 large red pepper

1 tsp sugar

4 oz tomato paste

1 tbs marsala wine

3 tsp basil

3 tsp oregano

2 bay leaves

2 tsp cilantro

1 tsp celery salt

1lb ground beef ( or chicken or chorizo or italian sausage) - whatever strikes your fancy.

3 tsp - 1/2 cup olive oil - depending on your taste and diet plan!

4 oz of tomato paste (you can use ketchup but it’s not the same. Too much ketchup makes it taste like sloppy Joe.)

I also use celery or celery salt, salt, pepper, a dash of marsala wine, a dash of balsamic vinegar.

Preparation

  • peel and seed tomatoes. For easiest peeling - boil whole tomatoes for about 2 minutes, scoop out and drop into ice water. Wait about 5 minutes. The peels come off EASY. You’ll see them splitting and floating to the top of the pot. Scoop out and drop right into the ice water. Peel, seed and drop into the blender or food processor. (you should seed them, however, we don’t mind and frankly it’s a pain in the ass to do so).

  • In a frying pan or your sauce pan, make a soffrito of the olive oil, onions, carrots, peppers and all of the other veggies. Add whatever you like. Cook on med high for about 2o mins until veggies are soft. Turn often to coat the veggies with oil. - Blend/process the tomatoes and drop them into a sauce pan w/ the soffrito. Add all of the seasonings , sugar and the marsala wine and/or vinegar.

  • Bring everything to a boil.

  • Simmer for about 2 hours.

  • At the two hour point, add the 1/2 can of tomato paste, ketchup and any other ingredients you want. Season to your liking. Also, at this point, you should brown your ground beef, sausage or chicken and drop it in. Cook the chicken or pork fully, but the beef can be simply browned (at least 75%) and then drop it into the sauce.

  • Cook for another hour to 2 hours (Simmer!!) to your liking.

When you’re done, either use it or freeze it. Don’t can this stuff because of the meat. I’m not a canner, but if you know that meat and/or other cooked stuff can tolerate canning, then go for it.

And as a side note – I cook sauce for about 2 hours covered and 1-2 hours uncovered. The longer it is cooked uncovered, the thicker it will be. You can also take out any of the meats to make a nice tomato sauce. The longer you cook it, the richer the taste will be. The shorter, the fresherand lighter the taste will be, i.e, marinara.