New Year’s Spaghetti Dinner

I’m almost caught up with my blogs. We’re up to New Year’s now! For the past few years we’ve been having an “appetizer dinner” for New Year’s Eve. I got kind of tired of that, so we just had a frozen pizza and a bottle of ChocoVine instead. Hey, it was still my week off, I was resting! But I did want to make something nice, but easy, for New Year’s Day. Spaghetti meat sauce was the first dish I ever learned to make as a child. I think I was maybe 9 years old when my mom taught me. It was easy – just brown some meat with onion, add some cans of tomatoes and tomato sauce, some herbs and let it simmer. Boil up some spaghetti. There you go.

I realized it had actually been years since I’ve made spaghetti meat sauce. I’ve been so busy trying out new and different recipes. It was time to revisit an old favorite. There’s a recipe on allrecipes.com that I’d been wanting to try for quite a while for Spaghetti Sauce II. It looked like it had potential and I could make some healthy changes to it to suit our preferences. I was intrigued by the use of tomato paste instead of tomato sauce. The addition of red wine appealed to me also, so I decided to finally give it a go. It turns out I made a lot of changes to the recipe, and basically came up with my own (check it out below). It’s healthy, hearty and perfect for a cold winter’s night, especially New Year’s night. I served it with Parmesan Garlic Bread, salads and a nice red wine.

Italian Seasoned Ground Turkey Spaghetti Sauce

(This is not a low-FODMAP recipe)
serves 6 – 8

Ingredients:
1 lb. Italian seasoned ground turkey (such as Jennie-O)
1 onion, chopped
3 cloves garlic, minced
2 tablespoons olive oil
8 oz. fresh mushrooms, sliced
1 (28 ounce) can diced tomatoes, not drained
2 (6 ounce) cans tomato paste
1 tablespoon dried basil
1 ½ teaspoons dried oregano
2 bay leaves
1/2 teaspoon fresh ground black pepper
1/2 cup red wine

1.    Heat olive oil in a large saucepan or Dutch oven. Brown and crumble ground turkey with onion, garlic and mushrooms until turkey is done and onion, garlic and mushrooms are tender. Add remaining ingredients and simmer over low heat for 1 to 2 hours. Add water if needed to thin sauce while it cooks.