Enough blabber, let's get to the cooking!!
First, the ingredients.
Onion, garlic, olive oil, one large can of crushed tomatoes, one small can of tomato past, one small can of tomato sauce (my cans are bigger as I am making a double batch here), fresh basil, bread crumbs, Parmesan cheese, parsley flakes, one package Italian sausage, and about 1 1/2lbs of ground beef. Not pictured are eggs, salt, pepper, oregano and sugar.
Dice the onion
Peel, then mince the garlic. For a single batch I use 3-4 cloves for the sauce and 3-4 cloves for the meatballs.
Saute onions and garlic in a good amount of olive oil (few tbls)
Them because Vita did it this way, as a heaping 1/3cup of sugar, salt, pepper and oregano to the can of crushed tomatoes (remember, I'm making a double batch).
After the onions and garlic are soft, add the crushed tomatoes with its extras, plus the paste and sauce to the pan. Then fill up the can from the crushed tomatoes with water, and put that in as well. Add about 7-8 basil leaves and bring sauce to a simmer.
Now it is time to get the meat ready. For the meatballs, to the ground beef add two eggs, the minced garlic, about a tbls or more of parsley flakes, 3/4c bread crumbs, 3/4c Parmesan cheese, salt and pepper.
Mix with your hands until all the ingredients are distributed evenly, but don't overwork you meat as that will make the meatballs tough.
Sometimes I add a little water to my meatballs to make them nice and moist. By the end they should look like this.
While I am mixing the meatballs, I have generally already started browning the sausage in a generous amount of olive oil. I usually make a test meatball and fry it up, just to make sure my seasonings are good and everything tastes good.
Once the sausages are done browning on all sides, add then to the sauce.
Roll your ground beef mixture into the meatball size of your choice, I go kind of medium-sized.
The brown your meatballs in the same pan as the sausage.
Then add them to the pan.
When you are done, the pan is gonna be filled to the top. Don't worry, this will change. As it cooks down, you'll lose a couple inches, and that's what you want.
While you are cooking, you're going to notice some grease/fat accumulating on the top of the sauce.
Go ahead and skim that off with a spoon. In general I save the tomato sauce can for this skimming and often fill it up with excess grease.
Like, I said, this sauce needs to cook ALL DAY, for you to get the best results. See how it has cooked way down, concentrating the goodness of the sauce.
Boil yourself up a pound of pasta, my fave is is cavatappi, a curly pasta with a tube in the middle and ridges on the outside, because it holds lots of sauce! Today we only had rigatoni, which works just fine. It was actually more than fine - it was amazing!
