Canned Tomato sauce-Doctoring it up

Making homemade tomato sauce is a labor intensive production. The quality of the sauce you get is unsurpassed. If you have the time, the patience, the tomatoes and the extra hands, by all means go for it! But is it really worth it? I think it is, but you have to get tomatoes when they are fresh and cheap (usually towards the end of summer). And you have to have a lot of tomatoes, I mean a lot.
You can make a huge batch of tomato sauce in summer and then store it in the freezer as needed. But that takes up valuable real estate in your freezer.

Two other options you have: 1) boil a few fresh tomatoes to get their skin off, dice them up and cook them down for a quick tomato sauce

2) Use commercially available tomato sauce. Ordinarily, I am not a big fan of commercial tomato sauce. But, sometimes, you just don't have the time to make your own sauce. I have found that commercial tomato sauce tastes almost as good, and is much easier. I use a brand called Classico, and it works great! Besides, they have cool jars which can be used for bulk spices.

I will usually spice the sauce up a bit. I will either add meat to it, or keep it vegetarian.


Ingredients
Meat (Pancetta, bacon, ground beef, ground lamb or ground turkey)
1 yellow onion, diced
3 garlic cloves, thinly sliced
1 can of tomato sauce
Day old red wine
a pinch of Harrisa
a pinch of Paprika
Chicken or vegetable stock
Green peppers, diced (optional)
Roasted Red Peppers (optional)

If you are making this sauce non vegetarian, start with browning the meat.
Add oil to a stock pot and add some harrisa and paprika. Next, add the meat and saute until brown. Some fat will come out depending on the type of meat you are using.

 When the meat is browned, add the onions and saute for a few minutes until golden brown. Next add the garlic  cloves and saute for 1 minute, making sure not to burn the garlic cloves.

Add the can of tomato sauce. Stir to combine the ingredients.

Take a swig of old red wine and add it to the pasta jar. Swirl it around for a few seconds to mop up any remaining tomato sauce in the jar. Pour it into the pot with the pasta sauce.

Add about a cup of stock (vegetable or chicken) to even it out.

Add the green peppers. Continue to cook on low heat for 15-20 minutes, up to 1 hour or until the flavors are well developed.

If you want to get creative, you can roast some red bell peppers, puree them and then add them to the mix as well.

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