If you checked out my last post, you recall me saying how much I love coming from an Italian family. My mom’s side is Italian, so my grandmother learned a lot of amazing cooking skills that she passed down to my mother. For years, I would sit at the bar connected to my kitchen counter and watch my mother cook that night’s dinner.  However, one thing my mom didn’t often make was tomato sauce (crazy, right?). She always thought it took too much time to cook the tomatoes, and with three kids, nobody has that kind of time. However, store-bought tomato sauce just never did it for me. That’s why I set out to create a tomato sauce that didn’t require hours of slow-cooking tomatoes. In this recipe, I used a 12 oz. can of diced tomatoes (which Guy Fieri says is perfectly fine, and I trust him). The sauce only needs to cook down for 30 minutes—yes, you read that right.

Ingredients:

12 oz. can of diced tomatoes

1/3 cup olive oil

3 medium basil leaves, chopped

1/4 cup chopped onion

1 garlic clove, minced

1/4 tsp. salt

1/4 tsp. black pepper

crushed red pepper to taste

Combine all ingredients into a pot and let cook on low heat for 30 minutes, stirring every five minutes. Remove from heat and place sauce in a food processor for two seconds to create a smoother sauce; for chunkier sauce, serve as is.