Ground pork seasoned spicy style. A can of crushed tomatoes seasoned as well. OTC garlic knots from Aldi.
When I was growing up our mom would ask us if we wanted Italian spaghetti or American spaghetti. The difference was pork versus beef.
Buying spicy sausage has become problematic because why does every brand of Italian sausage contain sugar? Anyway with a well stocked spice cabinet you can turn cheap ground pork into awesomeness.
And seasoning a can of crushed tomatoes offers exactly the same no sugar added return with way more flavor than a jar can provide.
Spicy Italian Sausage
1 pound ground pork.
1/2 teaspoon salt.
1/4 pinch garlic powder.
1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper.
2 1/5 teaspoons ground paprika.
1/4 teaspoon anise seed.
1/4 teaspoon fennel seed.
1/2 teaspoon red pepper flakes.
1 tsp onion powder
1/4 tsp cayenne pepper
- add all to a bowl.
- mix until everything is completely integrated.
- use fresh or freeze 1/4 lb per zip locking snack bag.
The sauce? I don’t have exact measurements on. But it’s mostly the same stuff except the paprika and cayenne. Maybe the amounts are different. But just wing it.
How much pasta? Just half a box. But cook the whole box. Save half of it in a container with 2 tbsp of butter. That will be a meal later this week.
Cost per person: $3
anise seed.
every time i tell someone to add a pinch of aniseed to their red pasta sauce they look at me like they’re crazy but damn it does so much. I lost my jar of aniseed in the freezer somehow once for a year, and when i found it i was so excited i forgot to add garlic. red sauce with no garlic is better than red sauce with no aniseed i will die on this hill.
It adds a little magic that pairs nicely with the fennel seed to add depth. I should try a garlic anise swap in a simple sauce to see how it goes.
our simple sauce is: canned unseasoned tomato sauce of your favorite brand (i’m trying to get my hands on some passata to use for special occasions, the recipe will adapt to that once we can try it), oregano, basil, (red, black, white, pick one or two) pepper, salt, garlic, little bit of aniseed, ground beef or pork, most everything to taste. cook the meat with the pepper and the herbs, put the salt in with the pasta water, add a ladle full of the pasta water to the sauce to help it bind to the noodles better.
my wife adds onions, my mother adds some sugar, I’ve been deglazing the pan after the meat’s done with a splash of red wine, we’ve all got our variations but that’s basically the general form of my grandfather’s lazy red sauce. when i was in college, i’d add only like two tablespoons of meat and it’d be more like a seasoning. now we can have a little more protein.
I was thinking more basic. Paste tomatoes, salt, small bit of garlic, pinch of red pepper flakes, some lemon juice near the end. The kind of sauce you’d use with shrimp and angel hair.
technically we have a lemon butter sauce we do with angel hair and shrimp but i like the way you think
Thanks for sharing; this looks amazing!
Maybe I’m too naive on this question, but is there an actual answer to the legitimate question you raised:
“why does every brand of Italian sausage contain sugar?”
Indeed, why does a spicy sausage contain sugar?
Huh, sure enough. For mine, corn syrup is the fourth ingredient. This is just ground meat so it never occurred to me to look at the ingredients
I just checked Whole Foods website. Sugar is in every brand that isn’t listed as organic and some of those have cai sugar. One thing I did notice was their meat counter sausage is sugar free. So it looks like you need to spend $6.99 or more per pound to avoid sugared sausage.
Meanwhile. Over at Walmart their Marketplace brand is just $3.97 a pound. Dextrose and corn syrup. Oh, and propyl gallate, which is slightly bitter tasting. And Johnsonville is just as bad.
Spend 50% more or make your own from ground pork. Those are the options.
Why is there what looks like a needle in it?
Home grown oregano that didn’t have the fine stems removed. I didn’t notice it until it was on my fork. I avoided death.
Yeah, that’s kinda weird…
Mamma mia!
That’s a spicy meatball
Looks yum, I am going to shit on you for the low cri cold white led lighting presumably in a living space. 2700k or… Or your wrong I guess
I keep thinking about a light box. But then I remember that I’m cooking dinner, not a photographer. When people start paying me I will consider changing ingredients and changing out the lighting. And trust me, I really want to change out the lighting.
I need a fixture with substantially more lumens and bulbs that offer more defused light. Actually that’s not even correct. I need to put a hole in the ceiling and also install another blight fixture from scratch. Which will be easy once I push the fiberglass insulation in the attic out of the way and install a new junction box and replace some wiring. It’s not the labor it’s the materials. But before that I have to correct some 80 year old wiring issues in the crawlspace that I noticed while replumbing part of my house when the septic tank decided to clog the main house drain.
But not your circus. Not your monkeys. My poverty living. My shoemaker’s kids.
