Ingredients:
• 1 jar tomato sauce of choice. Delallo's recommended or similar quality sauce... not Ragu unless that is your thing. Obviously you can make your own but a decent base in a jar cuts the cooking time considerably.
• 1 Bell pepper (choose a color any color) Chopped to personal chunkiness level
• ~ 1 cup chopped mushrooms of choice
• 1/2 yellow onion (or white, probably not red) (~1/2-3/4 cup chopped)
• 1lbs ground buffalo (or other ground meat of choice)
To Cook:
• Put jar in 2 quart sauce pan on very low heat, add seasonings if needed (chopped garlic, oregano, ground black pepper, Basil, Bay leaf or two etc...)
• put meat in frying pan, break up with spatula and season to taste
• Add onions, peppers, mushrooms to meat or cook separately as you like
• Cook on low-med heat until meat is browned and onions are turning translucent
• Drain meat concoction (if lots of grease is present, some low fat meats don't need it)
• add all to tomato sauce and add any remaining seasonings if you forgot earlier
• let simmer (very slow bubbling) for 30 minutes - 1 hour with the occasional stir
• When done its ready to go once its cool enough to eat, remove bay leaves (if any)
Notes:
If cooking ahead of time and this is too much stuff for one meal (2 adults and small child for us) then fill the sauce jar back up for use sometime during the week and freeze the rest for a second go round. Whole concoction with pasta of choice serves 4-6 folks depending on portion sizes. Heavy on the pasta and light on the sauce, or very 'healthy' portions might get you 8, maybe more... but what fun would that be?
Cost depends on ingredients, The above is around $25. Use Ragu/Prego and ground beef it is $10-15. use some seasoned chopped canned tomatoes with more seasoning added by you then simmer longer and it can be considerably cheaper (jar of sauce is 6-12 bucks, Couple of cans tend to be less than $5).
Time depends on how good you want it to turn out. Heat the sauce and cook the meat while adding the chopped veggies, then add to sauce and mix up. As long as you cooked the meat enough in the pan it is ready to go at that point. But the meat and sauce will taste independent of one another but is still pretty good. That can all be be done in 20-25 minutes or so. 30 with a quick simmer. However, leave it on to simmer for another 20+ minutes and you will have a much better sauce. More than 45 minutes or so is overkill with a pre-made sauce but as long as the heat is properly low you have to leave it going for a loooong time to screw it up. If you want your veggies to be a bit more... solid/crisp etc... then add them well after the meat and cook just long enough to let them soak in the sauce a bit. With a picky eater you can blend everything in with the tomato sauce in a cuisinart prior to adding the meat and they will be none the wiser!
You have lots of options to change this to suit tastes. For example throw in a spicy pepper for some heat. The better the starting sauce the better the end result. Low fat content meats (less than 7%) are easier to deal with but have less flavor and need more seasoning and simmering to soak in the goodies from the sauce etc... Higher fat content meats add more flavor on their own but need more cooking up front to get the fat out so you can drain it. If you are using higher fat content meats it is best to brown the meat separately from the onions/peppers/shrooms etc... You know you messed the meat part up if after the sauce cools you have congealed grease on the top... learn your lesson for next time :-)
In terms of healthiness the above with Delallos sauce has no preservatives etc and the rest is what you add and should primarily be fresh meat and produce. Use low fat meat and add no salt and all you have of those two hot button items is what is in the jar of sauce and the limited fat from the meat. Change this to a high fat meat, with poor draining and a crappy sauce and that can change fairly quickly. Not to say this output is super healthy or anything but it is better than average and strikes a good balance between naughty tasty goodness and flavorless health nazi fare.
