Because my wife disliked thick sauce, we came up with this spaghetti sauce. As a result, we developed this recipe, which we have been using for more than 20 years. Although we are frequently asked for the recipe, we have never shared it before. Hope you had fun!
| Cook Time: | 25 mins |
| Total Time: | 25 mins |
| Servings: | 6 |
| Yield: | 6 servings |
Ingredients
- 2 tablespoons olive oil
- 4 cloves garlic, minced
- 1 large onion, diced
- 1 large green bell pepper, chopped
- 6 fresh basil leaves, minced
- 1 bunch green onions, diced
- 1 bay leaf
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 1 teaspoon ground black pepper
- 2 (10 ounce) cans tomato sauce
- 1 (15 ounce) can stewed tomatoes
- 1 (10 ounce) can diced tomatoes with green chilies, undrained
- 2 ½ cups water
- 2 teaspoons white sugar
Instructions
- Pour the olive oil into a skillet and place over medium heat. Cook the garlic in the hot oil 1 to 2 minutes; add the onion, bell pepper, basil, green onion, and bay leaf and cook until the bell pepper softens; season with salt and pepper. Stir in the tomato sauce, stewed tomatoes, diced tomatoes with chiles, water, and sugar; continue to cook 20 to 30 minutes, stirring every 5 to 10 minutes.
Reviews
This recipe is soooo good. My husband said he didn’t want to use bought spaghetti sauce any longer! I followed the recipe except I cut the sugar in half and since I put the sauce in the crock pot, I didn’t add the water- crock pot did that for me. Excellent taste. Not too thin, not too thick – just right.
fabulous!!! only thing is it takes much longer to cook the water out. i let it cook for twice as long and it was still pretty watery for what im used to but definitely yummy!
The sauce is very good, but far too thin. I think a two to three hour simmer would work far better than the 20 to 30 minutes in the recipe.
Excellent recipe with fantastic flavour.
Great recipe, I left out the water because I like mine saucy.. If I wanted to increase the yield, I would add tomato sauce or more diced tomatoes.
This was a good pasta sauce. It wasnt one of my favorites but I enjoyed making it. I dont like my sauce as thin as this recipe is, so I only added about 2 cups of water and simmered a lot longer, about 1 1/2 to 2 hours. I did have to season this very well with italian seasonings and dried basil. When putting in fresh basil at the beginning it pretty much mellows out the flavor and is better to add close to the end to get the full basil flavor. I chunked up some yellow squash and added it in as well. The sauce came out nice and robust from all the vegies and simmering longer. It didnt seem to coat the spaghetti as well as other pasta sauces do, and it made a big batch! So we had plenty of leftover sauce. Thanks for the recipe! I may make again sometime because I really liked the addition of all the vegies in it.
I added a couple more cloves of garlic, used a red bell pepper (we don’t care for green pepper) and to make the sauce a little fuller, I did add in 8 ounces of sliced mushrooms. This was okay–not our favorite but filling. For my husband and I, we thought that the green onions just weren’t a good fit and it could have used more seasoning. I think that this would make a good dipping sauce for breadsticks or even a meatball sandwich instead of over pasta.
great flavor but way too watery. I dont like it thick, but man! This is too too watery. Next time I will not add water.
My family LOVES this sauce. I made a couple of small changes; I used crushed tomatoes instead of the tomato sauce (to make it just a bit chunkier), omitted the green pepper (because I’m the only one in my family of 4 who likes it) and added an extra can of Italian style diced tomatoes instead of the water because I didn’t want the sauce to be too thin. It turned out fabulous! This is the 3rd time I’m making it this month!!! Thank you so much for sharing this recipe, it’s perfect for the days I’ve forgotten to defrost meat for dinner and I always have all of the ingredients on hand!!
I really enjoyed this simple recipe. I hadn’t defrosted any meat this morning but had left over chicken from tacos last night. I also just used a Catelli spaghetti sauce as that’s all I had. Very versitile – a keeper Thanks so much!
Loved this recipe and have gotten rave reviews from all who consumed. I made some slight modifications… 1.) I simmered for many hours 2.) I added water gradually, 1/2 cup at a time to achieve consitency I liked. 3.) Put stewed tomatos in the food processor prior to putting in the pan (because I can’t eat chunks of tomatos) 4.) added some sliced sausage Thanks much for this great recipe!
DELICIOUS! My husband said this was as good as sauce from a fine Italian restaurant. I used yellow bell pepper instead of green because my husband hates green pepper, and I left out the water on the advice of other reviewers. It was a perfect consistency and the flavor was awesome. Look no further, this is GREAT sauce!
This was delicious! But with the stewed tomato and diced tomato, the sauce was chunky, which I quite like. I also added chunks of zucchini.
This was a really nice tasting sauce. I folled it exactly, except I didn’t have stewed tomatoes. My family found it a little bit spicy, probably due to chili peppers. We sniffed our way through dinner! Next time I will omit the tomatoes with chili peppers.
This was great! The sauce has a nice fresh taste to it, and I love the fact that it’s a great no-meat sauce. I will make this again for sure. I followed the recipe exactly and it came out perfect.
Excellent! I didn’t add any water and added one additional can of tomato sauce. Next time I will use only 5 oz. of tomato and green chilies…it was a little too spicy for my kids. They kept eating it though with lots of ice water…ha ha ha.
This recipe is excellent! My husband is not a huge pasta fan, but he couldn’t get enough of this sauce. I used fresh tomatoes from the garden and substituted three fresh jalepenos for the onion. It gave a nice aftertaste to the sauce. We will definately make it again!
This sauce was excellent. My boyfriend likes thin sauce so i figured i’d give it a try. I added some italian seasoning to mine, and also some finely chopped pre cooked Italian sausage. Thanks for the recipe Richard and suzanne.
Okay, Okay..I didn’t read the recipe submitter’s notes before making this recipe. I looked at the ingredients and had everything and followed the recipe as stated except used only 1 teaspoon of sugar. The end result was a very THIN and runny sauce (not like any sauce I have seen before). In order to make it more like my family likes it I added one 6oz. can of tomato paste. The green chili’s give it a very subtle heat. I served this sauce over the Maria’s Stuffed Chicken Breasts recipe. Overall, it was a good tasting sauce.
Excellent! Didn’t add any water & only used about 1 tsp of sugar. This is a keeper. Thanks for the recipe!
This sauce has an amazing flavor!!! I did not add the water as directed, used 1/2 the sugar and added about 1/2# diced fresh mushrooms. My boyfriend thinks I’m a gourmet cook and asked me to make a double batch next time. Thank you for sharing this wonderful recipe, Richard & Suzanne. I normally don’t like tomato-based sauces for spaghetti (I use olive oil, basil & julienned sun-dried tomatoes) but this recipe has changed my opinion.