Spaghetti Sauce- Ketchup and Kraft American Cheese Slices

As a kid in the midwest it was Chef-Boy-ar-dee.

Now we usually make it from scratch using our own tomatoes, fresh or canned. When those aren't available you might be surprised - we like to use the canned Hunts sauces and kick them up a bit to taste. They're good.

As a kid, I think we got prepared spaghetti/noodle sauces - although with real, original parmesan cheese.

Nowadays, I make it myself, using all fresh stuff ... or partly canned Italian ingredients.

Ketchup, however, is (and was) never part of the sauce.

What about fondue concocted with Cheez Whiz?

Velveeta and Rotel - chili con queso! If you eat enough of this stuff, a little while later, you can take a Cheese Whiz.

As a kid in NJ, if I wanted good sauce (oh sorry, gravy) I would go over to any one of my Italian friends house, where their noni would be doing mysterious and marvelous things in the kitchen at all hours of the day or night.

If you ever asked how something was made, it was understood that they would leave something out, or add something in, so that it wouldn't be as superb as hers. You just had to go from there.

My mother made a pretty decent sauce, but it was one of those simmering on the stove all day affairs.

Speaking of the midwest, I lived in Wisconsin for awhile. To be honest, there were some really good Italian restaurants there. However......

This one time I was talking to this young (20ish) woman, who was Italian, and the subject of gravy came up.

Oooooo, my mom makes the BEST gravy....would you like the recipe?
Well Hell Yah, I was pretty excited by the prospect of duping this innocent young thing into telling me the ultimate secret. I quickly grabbed paper and pen....

"Well" she said, "First you take 2 cans of Campbells Tomato Soup......"

I called my girl friend long distance to tell her that.....All I heard was the phone hitting the floor....then, in the background, someone saying....

"linda, linda....are you all right? Wake up!"


Jarred sauces have become much better over the years. That's what I use now, but only if I really like it.

I don't like the jarred sauces I've tasted, but I do use canned tomatoes when I start sauce from scratch out of tomato season. My favorite pasta sauce iwith meat is the Marcella Hazan recipe for her bolognese sauce. Snotty as I am about all this now, I was quite happy with canned spaghetti (what I think of now as wormy pasta bits with drecko glop) when I was about twelve. I grew to like Morton's frozen packaged spaghetti - thawed and heated of course - when I was about 22. Thus I'm a poster child for the view that change is possible...

Ketchup and cheese? For sauce? I am not Italian but even I think that is a crime against nature.

Yuck.

Canned/jarred is fine. But homemade is the best!

homemade is for the Sopranos. Takes too long .
There is a Canadian outfit called Catellis that makes great sauces and we would always buy 2 cases crossing the border at least 2 times a year. (They would sell it at LoFoods in New Brunswick. Last year we could not find it so we have resorted to taking a local brand and doctoring it up with stuff.

Now my own linguini with white clam sauce is a closely guarded secret .

At Italian restaurants here, and in Italy, you always get freshly grated (in good restaurants grated at the table) parmesan with you menu ...

Mmmmmm, linguini with clam sauce..

yeh and its my secret, you couldnt beat it outta me with a rubber hose

Didn't any of you guys use American cheese & ketchup as spaghetti sauce? I must be getting very ancient. At one time there was a SERIOUS cultural divide on this issue!

I didn't even do that in college. We'd just make grilled cheese sandwiches without bread instead.

I've never heard of that, Phoenix, and I think I'm as ancient as you are..

Could that be a New York thing? Maybe I can get a hold of Roberta, and see if she knows anything about it!

http://bbs.reimanpub.com/bulletinboard.asp?view=reply&replynum=5&threadnum=362365&catnum=&headnum=


Now I know that I am not going nuts!

Well, now that is different. American cheese slices and parmesan cheese are vastly different.

And you'd never eat parmesan with ketchup.

You can also pour that on your clothes for a remarkable shade of hunter orange.

And to think, all my life I believed that American Cheese and ketchup was a perfectly fine spaghetti sauce. I grew up on it!