Spaghetti with Meat Sauce

I heard back from our pending house guests this afternoon and they will be arriving Monday afternoon.   So, for tonight, instead of the Spice Rubbed Pork Tenderloin I was planning for the guests, I made Spaghetti with Meat Sauce.    This is my mother's recipe and this is what spaghetti is supposed to taste like, in my opinion.   My mother's recipe uses canned tomato sauce and canned tomato paste along with pan fried crumbled hamburger cooked with minced garlic, dried oregano, and onion powder.   Its a hearty meal and one of my favorites.   This was the very first meal I learned to cook (I mean besides toasted cheese sandwiches) in college. 

I remember when I was a kid and my family discovered Ragu spaghetti sauce in a jar.    We loved it and for a few years we always used Ragu when making spaghetti at home.   I am not sure why we started using Ragu brand sauce at home.   I thought maybe that's when Ragu came onto the market, but I just looked it up and Ragu has been around since 1937!   Maybe there was a marketing push that finally reached us.   I do remember the Ragu television commercials about the time that we made the switch.   After awhile, maybe a couple of years, we grew tired of Ragu and about that time my father retired and took over the culinary duties.   His spaghetti sauce wasn't quite the same as my mother's recipe and in fact the sauce was a little different every time we had spaghetti.

A few years after I got married, I was eating spaghetti made with some sauce from a jar and I realized that the reason I liked Ragu when I was a kid was that it was loaded with sugar.   It was the sweetness of the sauce that had appealed to me as a kid.   And as an adult, I really didn't want such a sweet spaghetti sauce.   I tried several major brands of spaghetti sauce and I did not find any that I liked.   I was craving that sauce I remembered my mother used to make.

I called my mother and asked her about it.   She said, we used Ragu and I said, "no, before we used Ragu... you used to make the sauce."  "Oh, that sauce she said, well I used a can of tomato sauce and a can of tomato paste and half a tomato paste can of water."

Well, I tried it and it was perfect!   Not too sweet, not too spicy... just right.   I have to hold back and not overeat when I make spaghetti.  The family likes it, too.   Although, I could easily make enough for left overs, my stomach cannot take that much tomato sauce two nights in a row.   So, sadly, spaghetti is a one night show with no left overs.  

Another thing that makes this dish great is fresh grated Parmesan cheese.   I just recently started buying a block of Parmsean and grating the cheese at the table to sprinkle over pasta or other foods.   Although I haven't checked, I guessing this is actually less expensive than buying pre-grated cheese and much tastier.