Saturday, February 27, 2021

Crockpot spaghetti

Spaghetti is one of the easiest dinners to make, isn't it? So why don't we have it more often? Go figure.

In an effort to make a dent in our extensive pantry, crockpot spaghetti was on the menu a couple days ago. Ingredients on hand: Ground beef, red wine, tomato paste, tomato sauce, garlic (lots of garlic!), onions, and mushrooms.

I hate red wine with a passion (someone gave us this bottle), but once in a while it's nice in beef dishes. It adds a nice fillip to spaghetti sauce. Like so many other dishes, spaghetti sauce is flexible. Add or subtract whatever you like.

Browning the meat.

Chopping onions (last loot from our last garden).

Sautéing onions.

Piling ingredients in the crockpot. Ahem. That's a HUGE plop of canned garlic on top.

Next: the tomato sauce and paste, mushrooms, and (glug glug glug) the red wine.

Spices. Pepper, salt, oregano, basil, and just a pinch of nutmeg. Later I added a tablespoon or so of sugar.

This was very much a throw-it-in-and-hope-for-the-best combo.

Stir it up, turn the heat on low, and forget about it for the next eight hours. My kind of cooking.

The result was rich and hearty.

Hard to go wrong with crockpot spaghetti.

7 comments:

  1. Do you cook your tomato paste with a little sugar before you add it? Takes bitterness out.

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  2. Crock Pots are aroma therapy, they make the kitchen and the house smell wonderful and inviting .

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  3. I love my instant pot for this reason: dump and ignore! And also I can get dinner on the table an hour after I've remembered that we need dinner...

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  4. Don't mean to be difficult or petty but in the midwest the pasta shown in your last photo is called penne pasta, not spaghetti. Spaghetti here is that long, slurpy strings of pasta. What you fixed looks delicious no matter what it's called.

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    Replies
    1. You're not being petty at all. That IS penne pasta. We didn't realize until the sauce was ready that we were out of spaghetti noodles. I figure it all tastes the same. :)

      - Patrice

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