Recipe: Tomato Sauce with Chicken Sausage

Sometimes you just crave familiar old comfort foods, you know?  The foods that you ate growing up, that bring back happy memories of love and contentment.  Of course, those foods are different for different people.  For some people meatloaf is comforting.  (For me it's horrifying, but that's just me.)  Lately I've been craving the tomato sauce my grandmother used to make.  It was the most beautiful thing in the whole world.  The smell filled the whole house when she made it, and just the slightest taste would fill me with this amazing sense of well-being that I can't even properly put into words.  (Why yes, we do take food seriously in my family, why do you ask?)  All of my happiest childhood memories have the smell of my grandmother's sauce indelibly linked to them, to such an extent that the first time I set foot in Old Yankee Stadium I was convinced that I could smell my grandmother's sauce bubbling away in the next room.  (My grandmother's sauce did not smell like the Bronx.  We just watched a lot of baseball in her living room, especially during the late 1970s.) 

Anyway, I do know how to make my grandmother's sauce, although I can't share it here at her request.  It will never be quite the same.  I live 317 miles away from her beautiful kitchen and the brands I can get (or, in some cases, choose) are not the same ones she used.  I can't even find the same kind of pepperoni she used.  I don't use veal, and she did.  Right now, though, there's a bigger barrier to my re-creating my grandmother's sauce and that's pork.  I can't eat it.  She used a LOT of it.  Still, the craving for the sauce was really becoming all-consuming, so I decided to try an experiment.  Could I make a sauce that contained some meat that would satisfy that craving, at least a little, without causing myself a whole wide world of hurt? 

This is what I came up with.  It isn't the same, not by a long shot.  It is still good, though, and it did make that desperate and impossible craving recede.  I served it with store-bought ravioli, because I am too lazy to make my own lately.  I do want to caution you against something here: good sauce, especially the kind with meat, is something that cannot be rushed.  Do not try to cut corners.  Save this for a day when you're going to be hanging around the house anyway, like when your kid has the sniffles or you're snowed in and wouldn't want to go anywhere anyway. 

Since I first drafted this post, I realized that this may fit the requirements for the Family Recipes blogging event, which is hosted jointly by Grumpy's Honeybunch, Lynda of Lynda's Recipe Box, and Laura of The Spiced Life.  I may have submitted something similar in the past, in which case I apologize, but I wasn't sure and figured it couldn't hurt.  Thanks to all three for hosting! 

Also, if you decide to make this with pork sausage, you can probably omit a lot of the olive oil.  The onions in my grandmother's kitchen were cooked in the rendered fat from the various forms of pork that first had to be browned.  I did try that here, but chicken sausage yields up a lot less fat than pork.  At least mine did. 

Tomato Sauce with Chicken Sausage (makes enough to top 4 portions of pasta unless you REALLY like sauce; approx. $1.67/serving)

1 28-oz can diced tomatoes (I like Muir Glen; if you use a different brand your CPS will decrease)

1 onion, minced

8 cloves garlic, crushed

1 pinch kosher salt

1 tablespoon tomato paste

3 tablespoons dried basil

1 tablespoon dried oregano

2 bay leaves

1 - 2 tablespoons olive oil

1 hot Italian chicken sausage, casings removed

Equipment:

• Large saucepan

1. Break up the chicken sausage and put it in the saucepan. 
2. Cook over medium or medium-low heat until browned.  Evacuate the meat and set aside; leave any rendered fat in the pan.
3. Turn off the heat (please) and add 1 - 2 tablespoons of olive oil to the pan, depending on how much fat you managed to extract from the sausage.  Heat the oil over medium-low heat.
4. Add the onion and cook gently until the onion is softened. 
5. Add the salt, garlic, basil, oregano and bay leaves.  Cook 1 minute or so, until fragrant.
6. Add the tomatoes (in their juice) and the tomato paste.  Bring to a boil.
7. Reduce heat, cover and simmer gently until the liquid is much reduced and the tomatoes are beginning to fall apart.  If you were to take a bit of bread and dip it into the sauce by way of a taste test, it would taste like the flavors were just beginning to come together. 
8. Add the browned sausage.  Cook another 5 - 10 minutes. 
9. Ladle the sausage over some cooked pasta of your choice and serve. 

Comments

[HoneyB]

You really caught the essence of what a family recipe means. I love how you describe your memory of your grandmother's sauce! Thank you for contributing to our event - we are glad to have you! :)

[Fearless Kitchen]

HoneyB - Thank you for your nice compliment and for hosting the event. It's lovely that someone is encouraging people to maintain their old family recipes. I can't say how often people have said to me, "Oh, my mother used to make so-and-so, I wish I'd learned to make it..."

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