The best spaghetti sauce ever! Can a canned tomato really taste as good or better than homegrown?
I was, at the time, given to eating take-out burritos almost exclusively. I was under the impression that Ragu represented a sort of miracle in a jar for those evenings that I ate in. After my first grocery run in that first house, Dimitri was helping me unload the Safeway bags when he came across my jar of Ragu. He began cursing in that overacted Italian way and declared that jarred spaghetti sauce would never darken the doorsteps of his house again. It seemed like a rule I could live with. In those days, the rules were few, strict and inane. I spent a summer in an Alaskan commune whose house rule was “no metal at dinner,” so everyone ate their salmon with chopsticks. I learned how to eat everything with chopsticks then, and now I was going to learn how to make homemade sauce. Dimitri did indeed teach me how to make the spaghetti sauce he made every Sunday, using plenty of olive oil and whole garlic cloves. Years later, I make the sauce every winter Sunday as both a way to warm the ho
