How to Make Basic Spaghetti Sauce (a Guide for Children)

You will need:

• 1 jar Spaghetti sauce with meat (Prego, Ragu, DelMonte, Francesco Rinaldi, are all good brands. Ask your Mom if she has a favorite.)
• 1/2 of a one-pound (16 oz.) package of thin spaghetti, vermicelli or angel hair. [When you put your finger and thumb around the bunch of dried spaghetti, the circle it makes should be about the size of a quarter. Measure two bunches the size of a quarter.]
• Minced dried onion and garlic powder (in the herbs and spices department)
• salt
• pepper
• small can of mushrooms if you like them
• Parmesan cheese
• 1 pound ground beef if your Mom wants it. She might have to brown it for you, or watch while you brown and drain it.

You will also need a large skillet or frying pan with a lid, a 2 quart saucepan or large pot, a wooden spoon, and a pasta drainer*, ladle and spaghetti fork if you have one.

1. Fill the sauce pan or large pot with about six cups of water from the faucet. Put it on one of the stove’s burners and turn on the heat to medium. Add a few shakes of salt to the water. Let it come to a boil (really lively bouncing around water). When it does, take your bunches of spaghetti and hold each end while you snap the spaghetti in half in the middle. Put the bunches into the boiling water. Turn the heat down just a little bit, but don’t put a cover on the pot.
2. In the frying pan, brown the ground beef if you have it, and your Mom is supervising. If not, open the jar of spaghetti sauce and put it in the frying pan. Open the can of mushrooms carefully and drain out the water that’s in the can. Add the mushrooms to the sauce. Stir it, then turn on the heat to medium.
3. Stir the sauce every 5 minutes or so, until it’s warm. Taste it, and then add a little minced dried onion, about 4 shakes of garlic powder, a bit of salt and a bit of pepper. Taste it again. If it is the way you like it, then don’t add anything more. But if it needs more salt, add a little more and taste again. Let it get hot enough that you can still safely taste it but not too hot that it burns your tongue! (If your spaghetti isn’t ready yet, you can turn down the heat to low on the sauce and put the lid on it. It will just keep cooking by itself minding its own business…)
4. Look at your spaghetti. Is it all limp and swirled around in the pot? If it has been cooking about 10 minutes, it should be ready.
5. Put your pasta drainer into the sink. Using potholders and both hands, lift the saucepan carefully and pour the water and spaghetti slowly into the pasta drainer (so it doesn’t tip over).
6. When all the water has drained out, put the spaghetti into a bowl. Put the sauce into another bowl (or mix the two of them together if you have a really big bowl). Sprinkle some Parmesan Cheese on top.

*Pasta drainers are also called “colanders”.

You can have salad and Italian bread with it, if you would like. Use the fork to serve the pasta, and the ladle to serve the sauce.

This is basic spaghetti sauce. It will serve 2-3 people. When you are older you can practice chopping onions and real garlic, and you can add those to the sauce. You can add seasonings like oregano and basil, too. Eventually you’ll have created your own sauce recipe!