Weekend Cooking - Easy Spaghetti Sauce

In an attempt to reduce costs and to also start cooking more of my food from scratch, I started looking for fairly easy recipes to cook myself this past winter.  On of the things that I found that I liked doing was making a spaghetti sauce from scratch.  It actually happened by accident, in that I had had some canned tomato sauce instead of some generic canned pasta sauce.  And since then I have have made this on a regular basis and have quite enjoyed making it.  I found the recipe on AllRecipes.com


Ingredients
• 12 ounces spaghetti                        • 1/8 teaspoon garlic powder (just a pinch would suffice)
• 1lb of lean ground beef                  • 2 tablespoons dried minced onion (I only put in a pinch or two)
• 1 teaspoon of salt                           • 2 1/2 cups of chopped tomatoes (I put in one can (19 fl oz or
• 3/4 teaspoon of sugar                       540 ml) of diced tomatoes)
• 1 teaspoon dried oregano               • 1 1/3 (6 ounces) cans tomato paste
• 1/4 ground black pepper                • 1 (4.5 ounce) can sliced mushrooms (this would be optional,
                                                            depending if members in your house like mushrooms or not)


Directions:
1) Brown beef over medium heat.  Drain off fat.

2) In a large pot (a large saute pan would also work well), combine beef, salt, sugar, oregano, pepper, garlic powder, onion flakes, diced tomatoes, tomato paste, and mushrooms.  Simmer at a low heat for about 2 hours, stirring occasionally.

3) Cook pasta according to package directions.  Drain.  Serve sauce over spaghetti.


Here is what the final product should look like prior to serving:

                  

Happy cooking!