Who doesn’t like a good old fashioned plate of spaghetti? It was always one of my favorites growing up and I still make it a lot today. My mom makes a killer spaghetti cheese bake that I will have to blog about sometime. I, however, cannot make it like she does no matter how hard I try! My mom loves watching Ree Drummond aka The Pioneer Woman and is always telling me about recipes that she sees on her show.
I have made her lasagna a few times and it is killer! I have never made sauce from scratch before and she has perfected it! It does take some time but if you are looking to impress…make it! It is fabulous! I have always just grabbed a can of store bought sauce, but when I tried Ree’s lasagna sauce I was overwhelmed with flavor. I used her sauce ingredients for inspiration for my supreme spaghetti sauce. I did add some green peppers and mushrooms to give it some color and spice it up a bit! I wanted to make sauce from scratch, but I did not necessarily want to have to spend 2 hours simmering the sauce. I love using my crock pot, so I decided to try to make a crock pot spaghetti sauce. I I vow to never use a can of spaghetti sauce (unless its an emergency) again! This sauce turned out even more delicious than I would have imagined. It is super easy and full of flavor.
Supreme Spaghetti
Ingredient List:
1 lb hamburger
1 lb Italian turkey sausage
1 fresh green pepper, diced
1 white onion, diced
5 garlic cloves, minced
1 large can stewed tomatoes (32 oz)
1 can tomato paste (12 oz)
1 can tomato sauce (12 oz)
1 tbsp oregano
1 tsp thyme
2 bay leaves
olive oil
whole wheat spaghetti noodles
Instructions:
Throw stewed tomatoes, tomato paste, tomato sauce and spices into the crock pot on low. (I used a potato masher after a few hours and mashed up the stewed tomatoes to break them up a little bit.) Brown hamburger and sausage in one skillet. While the meat is browning, chop the onion and green pepper. Mince garlic cloves. Saute the veggies in some olive oil. Add the meat and vegetables to the mixture and cook on low. Make the spaghetti noodles when it is about time to sit down to eat and top them off with the sauce!
This sauce was amazing and so easy. There is nothing I like more than a good crock pot recipe. I love the ease of throwing everything in and having a deliciously hot homemade meal ready when I get home from a long day of chasing around my 23 wonderful 2nd graders! I told Alex that I was going to call it Supreme Spaghetti and when we sat down for dinner he told me that was the perfect name for it! It was exploding with flavor! The recipe made enough for 3 different meals throughout the week! One night we put the leftover whole wheat noodles in a glass pan and topped it with a layer of mozzarella cheese before covering it with the sauce. Last we topped it off with some grated Parmesan cheese and baked it for 15-20 minutes at 350 degrees. It was an entirely different meal! I even thought pepperonis would be a good touch to add to it!
I got Alex a pizza stone for Valentine’s Day to use on our Traeger grill and have been wanting to break it out so I decided that the supreme sauce would be delicious thrown onto a pizza crust. I ended up making a crust that did not call for yeast because we did not have any in the house. The crust was alright but nothing special so I am not going to post the recipe for it. When I was at Hyvee, I contemplated grabbing an already made crust and by the time it was ready to make the pizza and didn’t. I wished I would have gone ahead and done that for the convenience factor. It was fine once I got it finished but next time I am going to look for a really good crust recipe.
When you cook with a pizza stone you must preheat the oven with the pizza stone in the cold oven before you even turn it on. This helps the stone heat evenly and prevents the stone from cracking. I ended up doing this in the oven because we were in the middle of a blizzard when I made this! The pizza stone worked out really well! It was definitely worth it!
I had a blast with this recipe and loved how I could stretch the sauce out to make different meals out of it! I think that may have been one of the best parts next to the ease of the recipe! Check it out and leave me a comment to let me know what you think!