We love requests here at Glover Gardens and recently, my sister (from another mother) asked for a tasty homemade spaghetti and meatballs meal to serve as a reminiscence of past good times with her late husband Jimmy. We made it happen! And in the process, we made lasting new memories.
Our newly created recipe makes a big batch, which is exactly what you want with a marinara: enough to serve tonight, and enough to freeze in several containers so that you have that simple, rustic, absolutely pleasing, comfort-food-at-its-best sauce on hand to use in the numerous ways marinara can be used. See the bottom of the post for suggestions.
Zippy Sicilian Marinara: The Big Batch
Makes about 12 cups, or enough for 16 servings when used with spaghetti.
Ingredients
- 1 cup extra-virgin olive oil
- 12 garlic cloves, pressed or finely chopped
- 4 TBSP tomato paste
- 4 (28-ounce) cans whole peeled Italian tomatoes, including juices
- ½ cup roughly chopped or torn basil
- 2 TBSP Zippy Sicilian (recipe here) or your favorite Italian seasoning mix
- 2 tsp kosher salt
- ½ tsp sugar
- Freshly ground black pepper, about 20 turns of the pepper mill
Directions
In a large soup pot, heat the extra-virgin olive oil over medium heat, then add the pressed garlic and cook, stirring, until golden, about 1-2 minutes, being careful not to burn it. Add the tomato paste and cook, stirring, for 2 minutes. Add the canned tomatoes with their juices and crush them hard with the back of a wooden spoon, which will take around 5 minutes. The tomatoes should be chunky but not uniform. Stir in the Zippy Sicilian, salt, sugar, pepper and basil and bring to a boil, then reduce to a simmer over low heat, stirring occasionally, until the sauce is thickened and reduced slightly, about 30 minutes.
Serve the marinara warm with pasta, meatballs, or in numerous other ways (see below). If you are making it to freeze, separating into four batches will give you enough marinara for four spaghetti meals for four people.
Notes
- This recipe makes a BIG batch. If you don’t want to “make and freeze” like we do, you can reduce by half or even just make a quarter batch. Half is enough for 8 servings, and a quarter will feed four.
- The reason this recipe calls for whole tomatoes that are then crushed as part of the cooking process is that the charm is in the chunks. Crushing the tomatoes by hand results in delightful variations in size and enhances the homemade essence of the dish. If you’re making a big batch, the crushing will require some muscle; you’ll have to “use some elbow grease” or “put your back into it”, to harness some appropriate colloquialisms. A shortcut is to use an immersion blender right in the pot to help with this task (which I have done for this recipe, on occasion), but be careful not to blend the tomatoes too finely. I’ll repeat: the charm is in the chunks.😎
The Backstory
My sister and I agreed that our spaghetti and meatballs creation needed a marinara for its sauce. That thick, red yumminess is a go-to for many, many dishes (see the bottom of the post), but I hadn’t made a marinara in years. Years and years and years.
A Marinara Night to Remember
I couldn’t find the recipe from my previous marinara triumph, although I could remember the night very well. It was the early 2000s and I was a single mom of a kindergarten-aged son after an amicable divorce. I hosted 5 other ladies at my tiny cottage in Old Sugar Land for a “make a big batch and everyone take some home” night, and we made a gigantic pot of marinara and several batches of cookies. This was while drinking chardonnay, providing emotional support, telling stories about our toddler children (all amazing prodigies, all with their dads for the night) and laughing uncontrollably—because it was that kind of night. A night in which no one was judging or keeping score, no one was counting calories, and everyone was relaxed. These days, I know that state as psychological safety, but back then, it was just a night with trusted women friends, prodigious laughter, and the right balance of food, wine and music.
A Quest for Marinara Magic
So I had to go on a marinara recipe quest. I remembered the old one as an early internet find, which I could have sworn was from Little Pappas Italian Restaurant in Houston, one of the ever-growing 50-years-young restaurant chain run by the Pappas family. But I can’t find any evidence that there ever was a “Little Pappas”, so it is a fractured memory, and that recipe is lost. That’s ok! I knew we could make new marinara magic, and that’s exactly what happened.
I scoured every Italian cookbook I had to learn best practices for spaghetti sauce, and did a similar recon on Google. There are so many recipes for sauces that work well with spaghetti, but I wanted a simple, pure, summer-reminiscent marinara.
Not a bolognese, not an amatriciana, not a ragu, not an arriabata.
Just marinara, deep red, redolent with garlic, made brighter with basil, and sporting a touch of sugar like that sauce I made so many years ago with my kid-mom friends.
A Found Recipe was Altered to Perfection
The winner was from Food & Wine, but of course I altered it. That’s what we do here at Glover Gardens: we make it our own. Just like you do with recipes you find… there’s an add-on or a variation and pretty soon, it is yours. I knew the Food & Wine recipe needed to be altered because it uses whole garlic cloves and basic sprigs in the sauce while it’s cooking—and then has you remove them before serving. No, no, a thousand times, no! That’s heresy! Garlic and basil must be in the marinara to stay; they are inherently part of its goodness. I also added the Zippy Sicilian, which has a great mix of dried herbs and spices, including red pepper flakes. A good marinara doesn’t have to be spicy, but it should be zesty.
We Did It!
My sister and I made the altered recipe together in the Glover Gardens kitchen one Sunday afternoon, and we were really happy with our creation. It matched my Old Sugar Land memory and was clearly a go-to standard. We froze the marinara in batches and when we served it to The Grill-Meister with meatballs as part of a special meal a couple of weeks later, he declared it an instant Glover Gardens classic. “Put it in the blog!”, he said.
Done. And the meatball recipe is coming soon.
Marinara Me!
There are so many ways you can use marinara:
- Tossed with pasta of numerous kinds; add cooked ground beef for a simple meat sauce, or meatballs
- A sauce for lasagna or pizza
- Spread on small baguette rounds as a base for crostini, topped with cheese and herbs and broiled
- As a sauce for veal, chicken or eggplant parmesan
- As a spread for a hot sandwich: meatball sandwich, hot ham and cheese, Italian panini
- Spread atop a beef burger patty, then topped with provolone, swiss or mozzarella cheese and broiled for an Italian burger (serve on ciabatta with grilled onions and peppers)
- Speaking of grilled onions and peppers, why not add marinara to sausage dogs to amp them up even more? Recipe here: Sausage and Pepper Dogs for Two
- Blended with plain Greek yogurt (half and half) and some Zippy Sicilian for a quick dip for veggies
- Stirred into sauteed mushrooms to add a little brightness
- Used as a base for other classic pasta sauces: add anchovy paste, capers, olives and more red pepper flakes for a quick puttanesca sauce, or add cream and vodka for a pink vodka sauce – or even mash those two together as we did in this recipe: Fettuccini Puttanesca with Shrimp and Creamy Vodka Marinara
There are so many, many more uses for marinara … how do YOU use it?
© 2024, Glover Gardens
I love your description of the Marinara Night to Remember!
Thank you so much, Anabel! I suspect you have had some nights like that with girlfriends, too.
Funny I see this recipe now. I planted some San Marzano tomatoes in my garden this year planning to make spaghetti sauce with them and they’re just beginning to ripen.
OMG, I just love a fresh tomato… anything! You can halve or even quarter this recipe if you don’t want to make it in bulk for freezing, but if you have a bumper crop, you could freeze some and have summer on your plate in December! The other recipe in the blog that really, really requires fresh tomatoes, and lots of them, is this one for spicy tomato juice: https://glovergardens.com/toms-spicy-tomato-juice/ . It’s heavenly! Let me know what you end up doing with your homegrown tomatoes, and thanks for stopping by, Blaine!
That looks like the perfect dinner!