Bonjourno! I am Marie Beirne with MGB Special Events and today I am teaching you how to cook pasta sauce with meatballs. We have already sauted our onions as first part of the process and now we are going to add the rest of out ingredients. Now, normally I wouldn t leave the stove in order to show you this, but for instructional purposes today, I am going to do that. So, we have here our sauted onions already iridescent, not burnt and we are going to add in the rest of our ingredients. The tomatoes that I like to use for this pasta sauce are Red Packed Tomatoes. I use crushed tomatoes. In the old days we use to use whole, but we found out over the years, the process was so much easier to just use the crushed. Remember, before you ever use any kind of can when cooking, you always want to wipe off the tops, take care of any dirt or any alien that might have formed on there. We are going to take our can opener and we are going to open up our can. Now this recipe calls for four 28 ounce cans of tomatoes. Clearly it's a preference for me and it would be a preference for you also, Red Packed just happens to be mine. Also remember, we are going to save the lids on our cans, just so that I ll show you what we are going to do with those later. Okay, we are going to add our tomatoes, got four cans here. Okay, now you could see how thick these tomatoes are, see how much tomatoes are still left in here, so what I am going to do, is I am going to get some water and we are going to add to it, to the sauce, just about three quarters of a can of water. Now, we are going to go ahead and get all of these tomatoes out of here. Simple process, we are just going to go back and forth and make sure we get all of our tomatoes out of our cans, pouring and just twisting. Of course, you don t have to do this process, but you get all the tomatoes out this way. Our last one, okay, and they are all so nice and clean up for recycling too. Okay, now we are going to add a half a cup of sugar, some people might say, oh, is it not going to be too sweet? However, whenever you are using tomatoes in any kind of dish, you need to use sugar in order to cut the acidity in it. So we are going to put a half a cup of sugar. We are going to use four cloves of garlic. I like to use large cloves, I have already peeled these, you can buy these in nice packages nowadays, already peeled for you or you can peel it yourself. Now when you do have it already peeled, I like to chop off these little ends here, just the brown parts and it will also open up the flavor more of your clove of garlic. And some people will say, well, why don t you saut it? Well, you don t need it for this, and you will find out that it will be enough garlic. I like to use four, you can use more, just depends on how much garlic you like. Okay, I like to use beautiful basil leaves and you can get basil at any grocery store in your area with the roots on and you can actually replant it, I do that all the time, when they come up with these beautiful leaves. These are about four, you could use four to six, and again, it's clearly a preference. Okay, now for our dry ingredients, I don t use tablespoons or measuring spoons, unless I am baking. I tell all of my students that it s -- clearly use your imagination and it's not a scientific science where you have to have exactly, exact measurements. So we are going to use about 2 tablespoons. My measuring spoon happens to be my palm. Okay, I am not a huge pepper fan, but I am going to use just about a tablespoon, maybe a teaspoon pepper. And our last ingredient is oregano. You could use fresh if you have it. I don t use a lot of oregano in this and I do use dried, and when you do use dried oregano, as within the other dried herb, I like to pinch it, just to kind of opens up the flavor a bit of the herb that you are using. And we re just going to stir it together and we are going to put it back on our stove, medium high, and in about an hour you are going to have a delicious marinated sauce.

Okay, we are going to go ahead and put our pasta sauce back on our stove, but I have a little tip here to prevent burning. When I told you to save your lids from your cans, we go ahead and we are going to do that, we clean them off, and believe it or not by putting this on here, this is going to help prevent your sauce from burning in the bottom of the pot. So, we put our pot on, we are on medium high and we are going to let this sauce cook, and in an hour you ll have complete marinated sauce, wonderful with your favorite pasta. Now we are going to go on and do our meatballs.