Spaghetti w/ Italian Sausage Meat Sauce and Garlic Bread

I have to give props to this local place around the corner from my Germantown neighbourhood. Vanelli's. They are incredible, okay. If you want some amazing Italian sausage and you live in this area, please go there, they are so good. They pride themselves on selling delicious Italian style sandwiches, but you can buy their sausage in bulk. It is about four bucks a pound and it is totally worth it. Geeze, you guys, it is the best thing to put in spaghetti sauce. And that's what I bloody well did.

Ingredients:

Spaghetti and Meat Sauce

-2 lbs of Italian sausage

-1 package of spaghetti

-garlic salt

-1 teaspoon of oregano

-1 teaspoon of thyme

-2 bay leaves

-2 large cans of tomato sauce (I used one can of tomato sauce and then another can of puree because puree is a lot thicker than tomato sauce.)

Note: the reason why I did not use many herbs for the sauce is because Vanelli's sausage is perfectly seasoned and I wanted its flavour to stand out in the sauce. If you are using store bought stuff, you may have to continuously taste test and add more herbs, if necessary.

Garlic Bread

-1 giant bread loaf of your choice

-2 sticks of butter (If you have a small bread loaf, you won't need that much. Wrap the rest of it up and stick it in the fridge.)

-Italian parsley (Fresh from our garden!)

-3 big cloves of garlic (Aww yeah!)

So, basically, you start out cooking the spaghetti by boiling water and all that jazz. If you have no idea how to boil water, I will advise you not to read any further until you figure out how to do that.

After the pot of water is boiling, add some pinches of salt. I like using garlic salt in my pasta water because it enhances the flavour of the pasta. I recently saw someone do that on Cooking Channel/Food Network and I was like OMG I DO THAT TOO YES. It made me happy because I thought I was just being a freak. Anyway, chuck in your pasta of choice (if you want, you can try tortellini stuffed with cheese) and stir that noodly goodness until it is al dente. Pour the water and pasta out into a strainer and leave it be.

Helpful hint: to prevent your pasta from getting all sticky and weird, take the pasta out of the strainer and put in back in the pot with some butter. Not too much, depending on how much pasta you have, just enough for the pasta to not stick to each other, making it a big globby mess.

I am not an expert, but you should not need to oil up your pan before putting the sausage meat in. It generally has enough fat to keep it from sticking. I had to use a little bit, like a tablespoon, but you should not need much at all. If you are using chicken, then yes, you should oil your pan because chicken is a lean meat.

After dumping Vanelli's juicy sweet sausage in the pan, I basically went all barbaric cave lady on it and stabbed it with my wooden spatula, turning it into random sized chunks. When that was all cooked and browned (do not overcook it!), I poured my tomato sauce and puree into the pan along with my herbs (oregano, thyme, and bay leaves), put the lid on it, and let it simmer for about twenty minutes. Twenty minutes is honestly not enough time to let all those flavours mix together harmoniously, but I was hungry and so was everyone else! My mother cooks her spaghetti sauce for two and a half hours. Yep. If you want to try that out, be my guest. I am impatient and it was still delicious, so whatever.

Now, on to the garlic bread. So, basically, I am Scott Pilgrim. Besides the fact I am Canadian-born, garlic bread is my favourite food. My doctor told me once that if I wanted to lose weight, I would need to stay away from bread. I laughed at her.

First, make the garlic butter. Smash a few garlic cloves with the side of a knife, cutting the nasty bits at the ends off, and grating them into the butter. Chop up some Italian parsley, throw that in, and mix it up with a butter knife. DONE.

Place the bread loaf onto a sheet of foil (I forgot because I'm an idiot) and then slice the bread loaf diagonally. Do not cut all the way through because (besides the fact you will ruin the foil) all that butter will escape from the bread (and that is just sad). Once that's done, butter both sides of each bread slice. Why? Just do it, you are going to die someday anyway. It makes the bread super tasty once it has finished baking. My trick is, once all the slices have been buttered to fatty hell, I use whatever leftover garlic butter I have and smother the loaf with it, spreading it all over the top. Wrap it up in foil, put it in the oven at about 300 degrees, and let it bake for twenty minutes.

Once everything is hot and ready to be devoured, put it on a plate and chow.

This is what sex looks like in spaghetti form.

I swear, you guys, it's friggin' delicious.
If you have any questions or you want to tell me how amazingly yummy this looks, I expect you will leave a comment (or not, whatever, I hate you).

-A