Pasta Sauce, the easiest make-ahead meal ever

Wednesday: Spaghetti with Marinara Sauce; strawberries with cream

I love marinara sauce. I know it's inauthentic and wrong, but for me, the pasta is merely a vehicle for the sauce. In fact, in my college days I would sometimes just heat up a jar of pasta sauce and dip bread in it for dinner. These days, I make my own sauce, but I still like to pretty much drown my pasta.

We usually use some variation of this Real Simple recipe. We almost always add more garlic and some sliced onions, and we vary the herbs, too. When Victor's cooking, he likes to simmer the sauce extra long, while I'm usually making this in a hurry and just do the bare minimum. The one constant, though, is that we *always* make at least a double batch. It freezes perfectly, and is really handy to have around when we don't want to do any actual cooking. (Because of my red sauce obsession, we only get two servings from the recipe as written.)

So of course, when our power went out last weekend, we had a container of this in the back of the freezer. Tasty, and pretty much effortless. And much, much cheaper than buying a jar of Ragú!