Aunty Edie’s Homemade Spaghetti Sauce

This is the super-secret recipe – long sought after by… me – for the best homemade spaghetti sauce you will ever taste!

I know you guys don’t come to the blog for recipes, and I fully admit to being a less-than-stellar cook, but when I find something good – like SO GOOD! – I want to share it so you can enjoy it too (and so I have it on the blog to easily look up over and over again.) 

My Aunty Edie (yes, at 47 I still call her that) makes the best spaghetti sauce in the world – in my humble opinion.

Every year I whine and beg and plead and she whips me up a batch for my freezer.  I’ve asked REPEATEDLY for her recipe, but like most great chefs (and favourite Grandmas), she makes it from memory.

This year, I booked a date with her and we made it together.

When I say together I mean that she made it and I tried to write down every measurement of every ingredient so I could replicate it myself.

This is her handwriting – but don’t use this recipe!  She changed measurements and added ingredients after she wrote this up for me. 🤦🏻‍♀️

Aunty Edie’s Homemade Spaghetti Sauce

Ingredients:

• Large, family-sized package of ground beef
• 3 jars of spaghetti sauce (she uses three different flavours)

• 4 peppers – green, orange, yellow and red chopped finely
• 2 medium yellow onions chopped finely
• 4 stalks celery chopped finely
• 3 pkgs of spaghetti sauce powder (she likes McCormick/Clubhouse if you can find it)

• 1 ½ tbsp salt (to taste)
• 1 ½ tbsp ground pepper
• 1 ½ tbsp oregano
• 1 ½ tbsp basil
• ½ tsp thyme (very little)
• 1 ½ tbsp Italian seasoning
• olive oil
• 1 can tomato paste (6 oz or 369mg)
• 1 tbsp brown sugar
• ½ cup butter
• 2 spaghetti jars of water to thin

Directions:

1. In a large frypan, pour enough olive oil to coat the pan and then sauté the onions, peppers and celery until the onions are just softened.
2. Transfer to a large soup pot and add all of the ingredients except for the ground beef.
3. Stir and bring to a boil.
4. Use the same frypan to brown your ground beef.  She prefers regular over lean beef because she says it has more flavour.  
5. Drain the excess fat and add the ground beef to the soup pot.
6. Let simmer for a half hour to 45 minutes, stirring often so that it doesn’t stick to the pot.  Keep covered as much as possible.

Guys, I totally offered to help (repeatedly), but this was about as close as she’d let me get to her “secret recipe”.  She was totally worried I’d ruin it by burning it or something – which isn’t an entirely unfair assumption.  😂

Oh my gosh guys – I burnt my tongue twice (although I couldn’t feel it as much the second time) taste-testing this when she wasn’t looking.

Soooo good!!

If you’re thinking “this looks like the most expensive spaghetti sauce ever” – since it’s made with like 6 units of spaghetti sauce… you might be right.

I didn’t price it out.

What I can tell you is that this recipe made approximately sixteen cups – or 16 servings – of the best homemade spaghetti sauce in the world.

It’s somehow creamy and thick, but filled with beef so your pasta has substance to it – not just drizzled with a ketchup-like substance.

We waited until it had cooled and then scooped cup-servings (3 per bag for my family) into Ziploc freezer bags.  Lay the bags flat on a cookie sheet and freeze, then remove the cookie sheet the next day and you can stand your homemade spaghetti sauce packages up like books on a bookshelf.

Sorry, I’m not much of a food photographer either.

I like to make up a huge batch whenever I bring out the homemade sauce – because first-day-spaghetti is great…

But second-day-spaghetti is FANTASTIC!

After the sauce has soaked into the noodles overnight.  I’m drooling thinking about it.

So after years of begging, pleading, whining and mooching – I finally have Aunty Edie’s secret recipe to the best homemade spaghetti sauce you will ever taste.

AND in portions large enough to freeze a batch for the whole winter!

Thank you Aunty Edie – I love you.

Have a great one!