A couple of months ago I wrote about my obsession with spaghetti and my trick for an easy creamy tomato sauce. Today I’ve got another little trick to make jarred tomato sauce taste almost home-made.

The sauce I used was a jar of Garden Vegetable Ragu. Sometimes jarred sauces are pretty boring, and I like dressing them up as much as I can. My favorite way to do this is very simple: I sweat some vegetables (typically onion, garlic, carrots, and celery) until they are soft, and then I pour in the sauce, add 1 teaspoon (or more to taste) of sea salt, deglaze the pan with a bit of wine (which is totally optional), and then simmer for about 20 minutes. Sweating the vegetables and then simmering everything together really deepens the flavors of the sauce. Adding more salt is entirely up to you and the kind of tomato sauce you buy – some are more salted than others, and you should probably just add a little bit at a time until you reach the flavor you want.

I also fried up some crumbled tempeh with dried herbs (rosemary, thyme, oregano, and black pepper) to add to the sauce for a “meaty” component.

I hope everyone that reads this post will try this method for enhancing store bought tomato sauce at least once. It really does improve the flavor.

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Yesterday I was mindlessly surfing the web when I came across a recipe on Bittersweet, one of my favorite blogs, for butterscotch pudding bread. I substituted carob chips for the chocolate, and used all all-purpose flour because I didn’t have any whole wheat pastry. The bread is super-moist and infused with delicious butterscotch. Anyone that knows me personally knows of my intense love of all things butterscotch, and this bread quite literally completes me. I will probably make this at least once a week, if not more than that. In the approximately 20 hours since it came out of my oven, I’ve already ate over half of it. Seriously guys, this stuff is like crack for your stomach.