Marinara Sauce and Moving

I promise I'm still here.  I haven't been busy recently, just distracted - very distracted - and not having enough discipline to sit down and write a blog post about all the fun I've been having.  All this fun revolves around our house - we are homeowners and it is finally starting to sink in!!!  The house is now mostly empty, and I'm hoping to spend time in there this weekend.  My parents haven't seen it yet and they will be in town.  Also, last weekend Bryan and I went to our friendly Sherwin Williams store and came back with a bunch of goodies to ponder.  So between day dreaming about our house, tying together loose ends for graduation, and packing (see the pic!), I've been a little distracted.

So food - we have been eating recently.  I've been leaning heavily on those stand-by, have made it 1,000 times but it's still so good, recipes.  We love Italian, anything with a bunch of tomatoes and I'm on it.  Several years ago Bryan gave me Everyday Italian by Giada De Laurentiis, and that is when I started making my marinara sauce from scratch, and I won't go back ever until I have multiple kids and no free time :-)

Here is the recipe from the Food Network website.  I usually double it and freeze the extras, which will supply us about a month of sauce.   This marinara sauce is very versatile; we use it on pizza, spaghetti, chicken parmesan, alter for vodka sauce etc.  The only adjustment I make to the original recipe is to add more tomatoes and more different types than the recipe calls for.  Example (as seen in the picture above): when "doubling" the recipe, I will use 84 oz crushed tomatoes, 28 oz petite diced tomatoes, and 14 oz diced tomatoes.  And also for variety, sometimes I will chop my veggies course, sometimes fine, sometimes I almost puree them in a food processor if I want the sauce to be really smooth.

Here it is when we had it last week - I added browned venison and we ate it over angel hair pasta.

Today has been a day spent mostly in the kitchen.  I made everything from lasagna to cheesecake to sausage breakfast rolls - will share pictures and recipe links later this weekend.  In the meantime, here is my latest ideas of paint colors for our house (these are all Sherwin Williams colors).  When I have time, I'll add info on which room is what, but for the mean time, you can dream with me. :-)