Happy Monday or Happy President’s Day for those who got a day off from work/school in the US. I didn’t, but I won’t complain either. The traffic was sooooooo light so my commute was a breeze today.

Speaking of which, the weather was quite freezing today. To top it off, the AC was blasting in the office for the whole afternoon. BLEH!

Anyway, when I went for grocery shopping over the weekend, I saw spaghetti squash, tomatoes and beef were on sale! So pasta dish came into my mind.

I’ve been meaning to make a homemade pasta sauce from scratch -no canned tomatoes, no canned pasta sauce etc etc. Just purely tomatoes, onions, garlic and herbs 🙂 It turned out fabulous and yummy!

100% Homemade Pasta Sauce
Ingredients:
10 ripe roma tomatoes
1 white onion
3-4 garlic cloves or more
2-3 shallots
1 tsp paprika
1/2 tsp black pepper
3-4 dry bay leaves
Italian seasonings
Dash of thyme

Directions:
1. Cut tomatoes into small chunks – discard most of the seeds (next time I’ll keep the seeds to mix with a soup. Do you know that tomato seeds have the most nutrition?)
2. Mince shallots, garlic, and onions
3. Preheat the skillet to medium high – add 1 tsp of ghee or your cooking oil choice.

4. Saute the shallots, onions and garlic until fragrant
5. Add in the diced tomatoes

6. Season with salt, pepper, Italian seasonings, paprika and thyme – adjust to your own taste
7. Add in the bay leaves

8. Cover the skillet for about 5 minutes
9. VOILA! Homemade pasta sauce is ready to be devoured

For the “pasta” (Primal style)
I cooked the spaghetti squashes in my pressure cooker – took about 15-20 minutes. If you don’t have a pressure cooker, you can cut them in half lengthwise, and steam them for about 20-25 minutes.

Cut them lengthwise and scrape the inside using fork.

Scrapped off everything!

Primal “Spaghetti” and Homemade Pasta Sauce served with side steamed bokchoy (and some beef stew) 😀

I admit, originally I was supposed to make Pasta meat sauce, but I was hungry already and decided to have lunch first then continued making the meat sauce.

I never like buying pre-grounded beef so I always select the beef cut and grounded myself- manually.
All you need is:
A cutting board
A sharp cleaver
Some arm strength 😀

Directions:
1. Cut the beef (I used beef stew meat) into small pieces- trim away all visible fat

2. Pound the meat using the cleaver until look like this

3. Fold over the minced meat and pound the meat – rinse and repeat – until all the meat look evenly minced

To cook the minced beef:
Ingredients:
1/2 white onion -minced
2 shallots -minced
1-3 garlic cloves – minced
1 tsp of ghee or cooking oil of your choice
Italian seasonings
Salt and pepper to taste

Directions:
1. Saute the minced beef with some onions, garlic and shallot on the skillet with high heat until the beef is thoroughly cooked
2. Season with Italian seasonings, salt and pepper
3. Mix in the pasta sauce
4. Serve!

It took quite sometime to make homemade pasta sauce, but I think it’s very rewarding, especially you’re in control of what you put in there. Store bought pasta sauce tend to have some additives, HFCS (high fructose corn syrup) and other chemicals that we don’t want to know.

Have you made your own pasta sauce before?

Do you like spaghetti squash? How do you eat them besides as spaghetti substitute?
This was my first time ever trying spaghetti squash and I’d say I LOVE IT! I think I like most squashes (kabocha, butternut squash, acorn squash)..any other squash that I should try?

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