Spaghetti

Tonight was a late night, so I cooked simply--spaghetti with red sauce. But it wasn't ragu in a bottle. I browned up some hot Italian sausage, deglazed with some red wine, and added in some of my frozen home-made tomato sauce. At the end of last fall's tomato season, we bought probably 50-100 lbs of "seconds" tomatoes, and cooked them down into a sauce. We froze it up in our deep freeze, and have been enjoying it throughout the winter. The up-shot is two-fold. First, the taste is so much better than the jarred stuff. I get to decide what is in it, what it tastes like, how salty it is, and so on. That's huge. Second, it's actually cheaper to do that, by quite a bit, than to buy even moderate quality bottled sauce.

I chose to make it a very basic sauce that I could then add flavors to as I saw fit per individual container. That means I can use the same sauce for a garlic sauce, another with basil, a third with cheese, and so on. That's another big bonus. I'm not restricted to whatever the producer throws in the sauce. Finally, I'm just plain thrilled to be supporting local producers, even if I'm buying tomatoes at a dirt cheap price. They're unloading product that is not necessarily beautiful, but tasty and useful.