This recipe has been in my family for about fifty years now. We aren’t Italian, and I don’t know where the recipe originally came from. All I know is I grew up with my dad making this recipe often for our family and I’ve never had a better meat sauce anywhere. Everyone I make it for goes on and on about how amazing it is.
The great thing about this sauce is that is works for lasagna, too. It makes an incredible meat lasagna when layered with lasagna noodles and cheese. You can also mix it with rice and use it to make stuffed peppers!
You can doctor this up any way you like. If you’re not a fan of mushrooms, leave them out and it will still taste great. Want to add some vitamins? Throw in a couple of handfuls of spinach leaves. It’s very forgiving.
Spaghetti with Meat Sauce Recipe
Ingredients
- 3 28-oz cans tomato sauce
- 3 pounds ground beef
- 1 pint white button mushrooms
- 1 large green bell pepper
- 1 large head garlic
- 1 large yellow onion
- 2 tablespoons dried oregano
Instructions
- Pour tomato sauce into a heavy-bottomed stock pot.
- Turn the heat onto medium.
- Slice mushrooms and add to tomato sauce.
- Peel the entire head of garlic (yes, it’s a lot) and slice cloves fairly thickly. Add to sauce.
- Dice onion and green bell pepper and add to sauce.
- Add oregano and stir.
- While sauce is simmering, brown ground beef. When no traces of pink remain, drain well and add to sauce.
- Simmer for about 45-60 minutes, stirring often, until all vegetables are tender.
- Serve over your favorite pasta and top with grated Parmesan cheese.
If your kids won’t eat this sauce because they see mushrooms or green peppers in it, simply add their portion to your food processor or blender and pulse a few times until the vegetables blend in with the meat and they won’t know they are in there. I used to do that with my little ones and they didn’t know the difference.
This makes a BIG pot of spaghetti sauce, so you may have leftovers. We always did. Luckily, it makes great lasagna as I mentioned earlier. The leftovers are amazing the next day.
One thing I also used to do the next day was to add some chili powder and canned beans to make chili. If you think about it, aside from the mushrooms this recipe is almost exactly like a chili recipe minus the beans and chili powder, so it works great.
