Spaghetti Sauce

This is a recipe from my dad, modified to be a little healthier and cooked in a crock pot instead of over a flame. You will need:
6 tomatoes

1.5 to 2 onions

2 green bell peppers

1 garlic clove

1 lb of ground beef or turkey
1 pack of mushrooms
olive oil
salt
optional: tomato paste

Ready?
Start cooking the ground meat in a pan and then put as much olive oil as you are comfortable with, up to a 1/4 cup, into the crock pot, set to high heat. Chop up the 6 tomatoes and add them to the crock pot. Here, I’ve added organic tomato paste from TJ’s, which will help the sauce be a little thicker, but is not mandatory.

Chop up the 2 bell peppers and add to the crock pot.

Peel and chop the garlic, then toss ’em in the crock pot.

When the meat is cooked and you’ve drained the fat, drop into the crock pot. This step can happen at any time, it doesn’t have to be right now.

Chop the onions (how do I?) and put into crock pot.

Chop the whole pack of mushrooms and dump them into the crock pot.

That’s about it! Now it just needs to cook. I usually cook spaghetti sauce in the crock pot for 4-5 hours on high heat, stirring and tasting every hour or so and adding a little salt, as needed. Then I reduce the heat to medium and let it cook for a few more hours. Oftentimes during a work-night, after the high heat cooking, I let the crock pot cool off over night, and then resume another 2-3 hours of medium heat cooking the next morning, instead. It’s helpful if your crock pot has a timer function. Mine doesn’t, so I just use an outlet timer.

The spaghetti sauce will probably be a little more watery than what you are used to, even if you add some tomato paste. Don’t worry, it will still taste awesome. I like to serve it on shell pasta so the sauce can pool up in each shell to maximize the flavor of each bite.

tip: this sauce can be frozen for later enjoyment

For those interested in the original recipe, the differences are:
a) All 1/4 cup of olive oil is mandatory
b) The sauce is cooked over med-high flame for 1.5-2 hrs total, stirring every 5 minutes after reaching a boil (or it will burn)
c) The ground beef is cooked in the sauce afterward. The fattier the meat, the more it will spread into the sauce. Leaner meat will remain more chunky.

Yes, I have cooked it this way before. No, I didn’t burn it.