Spaghetti #1 -- Friday Friend Cookbook recipe #17

I made my favorite mother-in-law's spaghetti sauce and it was great!

The Handyman said-- "I forgot how good my mom's spaghetti sauce was"

What a nice compliment from a son--who has had plenty of spaghetti sauces in his lifetime.  Most of those would have been mine, as I am constantly trying to perfect a signature sauce.  

In my quest, I asked the Friday Friends to send me their signature sauce recipes and twenty-four of them did.  

24!!  

That means I will be making 24 spaghetti sauces during my FF Cookbook Countdown.

(sigh)

Good thing the Handyman loves spaghetti.

This is a really good sauce.  Not overly tomato-y or bogged down with tons of Italian seasonings (like I tend to do.  I figure if a little is good, a lot is better), just a real full bodied meat sauce.

Her family loves it.  LOVES IT.

All 6 kids and 3 stepkids.

Her is my mother-in-law, Teresa Belcher.

Here is her sauce

Oh... she is a mixer. She mixes the sauce into the noodles before serving it.

My mother was a spooner over the top kinda spaghetti server.

How do you do it?

In the  Friday Friend Cookbook

in which our editor and publisher, Barbara Brown typed up,  she titled this sauce

"My Step Mom's Sauce"

Because one time at a family wedding or gathering, my in-laws 'fake' adopted Barb, so Barb has always had a special place in her heart for my husband's mother and visa-versa.

My Step Mom's Sauce

or

My Favorite Mother-in-law's Sauce

from the spaghetti sauce section of the Friday Friend Cookbook

1 medium onion chopped

2 T. Olive Oil

1 lb. lean ground beef

1/4 lb. lean ground pork or sweet Italian sausage

1 lb. Italian plumb or pear tomatoes, drained, seeded and chopped

1 cup tomato puree

1/4 cup tomato paste

2 cloves minced garlic

2 T. chopped fresh parsley

1/4 tsp dried basil

1/4 tsp pepper

salt to taste

1/2 lb fresh mushroom sliced*

Saute` onion till soft in olive oil.  Add meats and cook through--around 5 minutes.  Remove from heat.  Add the rest of the ingredients (except mushrooms) and return to heat.  Heat to boiling, reduce heat and simmer, uncovered, stirring often, till sauce is thick.  (45 minutes to an hour).

Stir in mushrooms and cook another 15 minutes. Black olives can also be added with mushrooms.

**I bought the mushrooms, but at the end I forgot about them, so we had the sauce without.

I happen to be one of the luckiest women alive-- in that I have always loved my mother-in-law and she has always loved me.

I hope that her example of what a mother-in-law should and can be rubs off on me so that my DIL's love me too.

And like me!  As I like and love them.

Too mushy?!

Heck yah---let me get on with telling you about this Friday Friend  (so lucky to get to call my mother-in-law my friend!  oh dang...mushy again)

My mother-in-law, Teresa Marie Solaro (Stone) Belcher 

is half Italian.

Her father was Italian, so lots of her  cooking reflects that influence.

She grew up with her parents in Nevada City, California, where they owned and ran a boarding house.  She said her mom and grandma cooked all the time and she remembers sitting on the kitchen floor watching them.

The half-Italian heritage filters down...

It makes the Handyman  1/4 Italian of course, and then my kids  1/16, but you'd never know it filtered down that much, the way they love and are proud of their Italian heritage.

This is not a great picture  (photo quality speaking that is)   of my mother in law, but one is which she looks so happy and I like it.

It was a a graduation dinner for one of my kids.

A lot of the family were here---not all of them, but a lot.

I tried to crop it from this bigger picture--

and while I was downloading photos, I came across this one of

Teresa and her daughters---some of my favorite sister-in-laws! (I have 10 of them)

The Handyman's mom, Teresa, and his sisters, Eva, Cheryl and LeAnne.

And that is the story of Spaghetti Sauce #1.

I am linking up to Weekend Cooking at Beth Fish Reads.

Weekend Cooking is open to anyone who has any kind of food-related post to share.