Homemade Red Sauce over Orecchiette

There’s nothing better than smelling a pot of something homemade and delicious simmering on the stove all day and knowing you’re going to have a really awesome meal when it’s ready. That’s precisely what this day was like: a rainy Sunday that we spent doing Spring cleaning, moving furniture around the apartment and other household tasks. We knew we wanted to reward ourselves at the end of the day so we decided to make a homemade red pasta sauce – one of both of our most favorite things in life – and let it simmer while we worked. Simmer it did, make our apartment smell like a small kitchen in Italy it did, and satisfy our craving for a little taste of Italy in our freshly cleaned, newly arranged Richmond home it did.

James cooked the ground hot Italian sausage first and set it aside while I chopped all of the veggies shown above. He threw the veggies in a large pot with some olive oil and let them cook a minute or two, then added the sausage, a large can of crushed tomatoes and a little tomato paste. He stirred all of those together and sprinkled in your basic Italian herbs and spices… basil, oregano, black and white pepper, thyme, etc. The pot was left to simmer for a few hours and stirred every now and then.

After our hard work was complete, we sat down to a delicious, exquisitely homemade just-the-way-we-like-it sauce over some orecchiette pasta which is just such a fun shape and a nice variation from the typical spaghetti noodle, and also holds the sauce really well. The flavors were perfect and paired wonderfully with a bottle of Cabernet Franc that we had been waiting to enjoy with the right meal since picking it up at Barboursville Vineyard when we visited it last fall. All in all, a pretty perfect meal to finish off a productive rainy day indoors!