Spaghetti Recipe

One of my most favorite meals is spaghetti. My mom makes the best spaghetti sauce... it's still my favorite. The past few weeks, I have been craving a spaghetti meal, but I haven't found a place here that comes any where close to the flavor that I love so much. The only place that has sauce resembling my mother's is Carabba's, and that's not in Reno. You would think I would just fix it at home often or something... nope. But it's because I haven't found a recipe I like, and believe me I've tried. I've tried to do what my mom does, but she goes off the hip so much that it's difficult to mimic her sauce. AND, I discovered a few years ago that she uses Ragu Sauce as an ingredient. (I always thought it was completely homemade).

Last night was FHE and my turn to cook dinner. Three or four days ago I went looking for another sauce recipe. The first place I looked was The Pioneer Woman.com. She always has great recipes for food and it never fails to turn out wonderful. She doesn't have a spaghetti sauce recipe though. I usually like to try allrecipes.com, but you can get some wacky stuff on that website and it takes too long to find something decent. The past few weeks, I had been listening to The Splendid Table on NPR while traveling back and forth to choir practice on Sundays. So, I decided to check out their website and see if they had any kind of Italian type red sauce recipe. The website is not real user friendly, but I found one that your supposed to make for penne pasta.

I thought it was a bit strange because it calls for 4 different fresh herbs, a whole minced carrot and a whole minced stalk of celery, and only one clove of garlic. It actually turned out really great! I was so impressed, and everyone else thought it was pretty good too. I didn't add the basil at the end, and I used 4 cloves of garlic (because I love it), I also added a small can of tomato sauce to stretch it out a bit. There was only a tiny bit of sauce left over, and there were 5 of us eating. :(... I want some more spaghetti. By the way, I use Angel Hair.

Here is the recipe:
Soffritto of Tomatoes and Fresh Herbs with Penne