Chunky spaghetti sauce- from scratch!

In the past, I usually made spaghetti sauce using a bottled sauce as a base. This time I went without anything pre-flavoured and it turned out GREAT! I use ground organic chicken, but you can skip the meat altogether or you can use ground organic beef in its place. I will admit that using chicken results in much less fat than if you use beef, so there is a bit of a lack of viscosity. So, I cheated a bit and added a knob of "Earth's balance" shortening to the pot. I know...it's horrible...but this is one place where I really do think beef works better. However, chicken was awesome too. Okay- here's the recipe:


Spaghetti sauce from scratch (easily vegan, GF, CF)

Main ingredients:
1Tb grapeseed oil
1 chopped sweet onion
4 cloves of garlic
2 organic chicken breasts, ground in your food processor
1 green pepper
4 stalks celery
2 zucchinis
1 pint chopped mushrooms
2 x 720mL bottles strained low sodium tomato "Passata" (sub crushed, but make sure they're low sodium)
1 small can tomato paste
juice from 1/4 lemon

Seasonings:
1 Tb dried basil
1/2 Tb dried oregano
1/2 tsp rosemary
1/2 tsp thyme
1/4 tsp celery seed
1/4 Tb salt
1/8 Tb pepper
2 pinches saffron
2 pinches cayenne pepper (I would have loved more but not with kids!)

Directions:
Chop onion and heat on medium or medium low in the grapeseed oil until it's translucent (not brown). That might take 5-10 minutes. Add the chopped garlic and heat for an additional minute.
Add the ground chicken and stir it in, cook until all the pink is gone. This only takes a handful of minutes.
Add all the chopped veggies to the pot and stir several times, heating the veggies through. Add the tomatoes and the seasonings, stir well, cover and simmer on very low for about an hour.

Serve over brown rice noodles, steamed spaghetti squash, or raw zucchini noodles (made by slicing them super thin into noodle shapes).

We simmered this over the afternoon, had a big warm bowl full then headed out to the Santa Claus parade. It was awesome!!

Chunky spaghetti sauce- from scratch!