Day 10: homemade pasta sauce? Not too hard. :)

So as I told yall yesterday I prepared a homemade meat pasta sauce last night with gnocchi.  Jon absolutely loved it!!  Of course, Alex decided he didn't want my slaved over meal (:-P) so he had a peanut butter and jelly. *sigh*  it seems like that's the ONLY thing he eats these days.  that and quick rice (which sodium content is astronomical!  I tend to limit that to once a week) which I usually can't stand.  Well, I might as well get to posting the recipe and pictures!  I'm going to take Alex and Hannah to play at the wolfchase play area today.  Hopefully there won't be 10 year old kids playing in there this time.  I simply don't get why you would allow your pre-TEEN to play in a toddler play area.  It's beyond me.  But any way... here is everything!

The recipe itself wasn't necessarily hard.  The only thing I found to be time consuming is the amount of time it needs to simmer and combine.  It says almost 2 hours of simmering but after about an hour I noticed that my sauce was combined and looked much thicker and hearty.

• 
  
• 1 pound bulk Italian sausage
• 1 can (28 ounces) crushed tomatoes, undrained
• 1 medium onion, chopped
• 1 cup water
• 1 can (6 ounces) tomato paste
• 1 tablespoon brown sugar
• 1 tablespoon Italian seasoning
• 3 garlic cloves, minced
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 teaspoon pepper
• 2 tablespoons parsley
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 
  
• 1. Take a large non stick pan and combine the sausage, olive oil , onion and garlic.  Cook on medium until the sausage is browned and the onions are tender; drain grease.
• 2. Add tomatoes, tomato paste, brown sugar, italian seasoning, water, and other seasonings.  Mix all these together and bring to boil.  
• 3. Lower heat and simmer for 2 hours.  (Not really an hour should be sufficent. :-P)  

Now for pictures!!!

Here is the combination of sausage, onion and garlic: 

Sorry for the horrible quality of pictures.  I can't find my camera charger so I had to use my phone camera :-/  although my phone camera is 8 megapixels so they should be the same quality?  oh well.

Here is my sauce after I added everything.  I will warn you it can get messy :)

This is the sauce after an hour of simmering.    This is right before I added it to the gnocchi.  

And.... the END PRODUCT!!!  I added a touch of parmesan on top :)

Glad I got to share my recipe of the week with you guys!!  It's pretty easy to make homemade pasta sauce.  I don't think I realized how easy making homemade stuff is.  :)