Spaghetti - My Grandma's Recipe

Passover is over and I need my Chametz!! Mmmm....I can eat bread again and cereal and oatmeal and pizza and pasta!

This is one of the foods that I have been craving all throughout Pesach and that I crave most often in general. I don't mean out of all of my grandma's recipes. I mean out of all foods in the world. I'm not saying that it's my favorite. I love way too many foods to pick a favorite.  It's one of my favorites, but you'll notice I say that about so many of these recipes. When we went away this summer to Chicago and Denver, my mom offered to cook us a meal for dinner the night we flew back. Without hesitation I chose spaghetti. We ate very well on that trip thanks to my mother-in-law's cooking and the two Kosher restaurants in Denver, but I NEEDED spaghetti!!

This is one of those foods that I grew up on. My grandma would make it for us all the time. This is not Syrian spaghetti.  I only ate Syrian spaghetti (which is also delicious) when I would visit my cousin Ida in the summer. My grandma's recipe was her own creation. Now I make it all the time. Sometimes I make it with whole wheat noodles, sometimes with small curly noodles, whatever I have around. It tastes a little different depending on what shape noodle and if using whole wheat, but it is always delicious.

Grandma's Spaghetti

1) 1 pound spaghetti (or pasta of your choice)

2) 2 teaspoons of oil

3) Chicken - 2 legs and 2 thighs

4)1/2 onion

5) 1/2 can of small tomato paste

6) 1 (15 oz.) can of tomato sauce

Put the oil in the pot and add the chicken. Brown the chicken on all sides. Meanwhile, chop the 1/2 onion into small pieces. Take the chicken out of the pot. Put the onion in the pot and brown for 1-2 minutes. Add 1/2 the can of tomato paste. Add the tomato sauce. Fill the empty can of tomato sauce with water 2x and add to pot. Add the chicken back into the pot. Bring to a boil, cover and simmer. Cook for 1.5-2 hours.

When the sauce is almost ready, boil the spaghetti, but leave them hard. Add to the boiling sauce for 10 minutes and then shut the gas. 

Note: The sauce can be made ahead of time and frozen. 

By the way: Back when this blog was still about adding peanut butter and pesto to my grandma's recipes, Sarah and I added both pesto and peanut butter to our spaghetti. Actually, only Sarah tried it because I was pregnant and had a terrible peanut butter aversion. I never ended up publishing these pictures (until today) and then we decided to do away with our experiment, but here's to the good old days:

Sarah loved the addition of pesto to the spaghetti. SUCCESS!

She was not a fan of the spaghetti and peanut butter, however.  FAIL!

 

 

 

 

 

One more thing: What do you think of our blog's new look? We're probably going to still tweak it here and there and we would love any suggestions you might have!