Homemade Spaghetti Sauce

After visiting the farmer's market last Saturday, I had more tomatoes than we knew what to do with--so I made my own tomato spaghetti sauce. I started with a recipe from my grandmother's Cooking Down East by Marjorie Standish (a family favorite), but ended up with my own creation.

I used:

One large red tomato, diced

5-10 yellow Roma tomatoes, cut in half

1 slice onion

1 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon sugar

1/4 teaspoon pepper

2 large links Italian sausage

3 tablespoons butter

2 table spoons flour 

I started by taking the sausages out of their casings, tearing them into 1 inch pieces, and throwing them into a large frying pan. Once they were brown and juicy, I added the red and yellow tomatoes, onion slices, sugar, salt and pepper, and let the mixture simmer on low heat for about 15 minutes. Next, I added the butter and flour and stirred the mixture, continuing to cook over low heat, until it thickened into a sauce.

That's it! Season with salt, pepper, and olive oil and serve with shredded parmesan cheese. Yum.

P.S. This is really a great book for cooking basics. The recipes are simple and really bare-boned, which allows you to experiment with extra seasonings and flavors. For example, the tomato sauce recipe I used originally called for canned tomatoes, but I easily substituted the fresh tomatoes I got at the farmer's market, and added in the Italian sausage.

It's also a fun cookbook because it was published 1969, but Marjorie Standish started writing her recipes for the Maine Sunday Telegram in 1948! It definitely has that "like grandma made it" quality, and my copy even has my nana's comments in the margins. She noted in neat cursive when she did something different from the recipe, or when my grandfather really liked a specific dish. It is remarkable to have the physical evidence of so many shared homemade meals, I am happy to be the third generation to use this book.