Don’s Classic Spaghetti Sauce

One of the first meals I cooked when I was a poor college student was Spaghetti and Sauce. The recipe is incredibly simple, and I called my mom up to ask her how the sauce I grew up with was made. And I still make it (other than the meat) the same way. Instead of using ground beef, which I later evolved to use ground chicken, I now grill or smoke chicken thighs. But everything else is the same. Very simple.

Grill or smoke a back of boneless, skinless chicken thighs. Tonight I smoked a pack of thighs for about an hour. They don’t have to be cooked all the way through, as they will spend the next couple hours in simmering sauce.

In a large pot, caramelize a large sweet onion in olive oil, add about 4-5 minced fresh garlic cloves at the end. You want them to be fragrant, but not burnt.

Add two large cans of crushed tomatoes and one large can of fire roasted diced tomatoes. Not the 12 oz cans, but whatever the big size is.

Add oregano, basil, black pepper to taste. If dried, I would say a few tablespoons of each. Toss in a couple bay leaves.

Cook this for an hour, at least. Diced up the chicken to be bite-sized and add it to the sauce on a simmer. Cook it for another hour. At the end, I tossed in a handful of fresh Italian parsley, thanks to our friend Deborah Firer, fresh from her garden.

Tonight we served it with heart-of-palm ‘angel hair’ pasta. So I heated it up with a couple scoops of sauce, then plated it, and added more hot sauce on top. To this was grated some fresh Parmesan cheese and topped with some sliced green onions.

This is not a fancy, or exotic meal. This is a classic, fairly healthy winter dinner…something I’ve been waiting to do again since last winter. BUT…it’s not over. The next step will be in a few days when the sauce is used to make a semi-healthy heart-of-palm lasagna!