Can you guess what we had for dinner last night??? Here's a hint:
Not the sharpstpicture in the world...but I'm having a heck of a time gettig this little one to stand still for me these days. :) I had to capture it regardless. What you can't tell is that the trail continues all the way down her belly, on both knees and one toe. Needless to say we headed straight for the bath! :) That's what happens when you turn around fora minute to put the dishes in the dishwasher I guess. lol!
As you can probably tell, my kids LOVE this stuff. I make a big batch every few weeks and divide it up into plastic containers and freeze it. Since it is a "Tammy Special," meaning I made it up and there is no "real" recipe, I'll do my best to give one toyou so you can get your kidsll excited about eating veggies in this form too. ;)
I use one 6 Quart Stock Pot for this recipe. The idea is to FILL it up with as many of the following veggies as you can. These quantities are to give you a rough idea, but if you have more room, throw more in! :)
You will want a hand blender for this recipe!
2 lbs baby carrots
3 onions roughly chopped
4-6 stalks of celery roughly chopped
1 red pepper roughly chopped
1 container sliced mushrooms
handful or two of baby spinach
4 tsp crushed garlic (i buy this in the jar at the grocery store) you can be generous with this!
6 TBS olive oil (or enough to coat the bottom of your stock pot liberally)
4-5 TBS Italian Seasoning
5 jars of Ragu Traditional Pasta Sauce. I use this instead of regular old tomato sauce because it already has a little seasoning on it's own and it's NOT a sweet sauce. Some of them, like prego and others, have a LOT of sugar in them.
Put all ingreadients in your stock pot and turn the heat down to med-low. Let simmer and sweat the veggies down 45 minutes or so. (they will take up about 1/2 as much space as when you started cooking them)
Add as much Ragu as you can to fill your pot. Let simmer all together for another 45 minutes. Once it has simmered, blend the sauce together with the hand blender until it's smooth and you're done! :) Separate it into containers, let cool and freeze.
Serving Suggestion: This is GREAT on it's own, but if you want to jazz it up a little mix a brick of softened/melted cream cheese to one of your containers of sauce when you're ready to pour it over your pasta and it will be a YUMMY cheesy sauce.
Makes a great dip too for bread sticks if you change the ratio of sauce to cream cheese, adding even more cream cheese to thicken it up. YUM!!
Enjoy!
Happy Cinco de Mayo!
Have a great day!
-t
Yummy - got to love when you can sneak in veggies. I'm thinking zucchini would be good too!
Posted by: Leilani | May 06, 2009 at 06:50 AM