Sauce, or Neapolitan Gravy and cupcakes.

Wednesday was the next step in putting together our spaghetti dinner.  It was a little ambitious, but we worked to make gluten free chocolate cupcakes and the tomato sauce for the spaghetti.

We started with the cupcakes, because they could bake while we were working on the sauce.  We chose Gluten Free so that everyone could enjoy them, and used gluten free vanilla, and have gluten free frosting to complete them on Thursday.  This cake mix called for vanilla, eggs, milk, butter, and lemon juice.  Rather than make a layer cake we decided on cupcakes so that each person could have their own to frost.

We used cupcake papers to make it easier to clean up afterward.  Aida and Yaida got to crack eggs, stir the ingredients into the whipped butter, and use the mixer.
 

After we put the cupcakes into the oven to bake we looked at the sauce ingredients.  Because we had a limited time to work, we doctored canned tomato sauce, meaning we fixed it with our own ingredients to make it to our own taste.  I had brought in my basil plant from home, and we sniffed at and tasted the fresh basil leaf, then examined dried basil from a store.  We looked at and smelled dried oregano, garlic powder, black, green and white peppercorns, and onion powder. 

For our sauce however, we would use fresh garlic and finely chopped white onion.  We cooked these in a small amount of olive oil until the onion was clear and cooked through.  Cooking peppers, onions, garlic and other vegetables before putting them in the sauce is necessary, because these ingredients will not cook further once they are mixed with tomatoes.  So rather than have crunchy, raw onions in a sauce it's better to saute them before hand.

Once the garlic and onion were cooked through we mixed in 1 tablespoon of dried basil and one of dried oregano, as well as a teaspoon of salt.  The girls chose the dried basil because they said the fresh basil smelled too strong.  At this point the cupcakes came out of the oven.  When they were cooled they went into the refrigerator to wait until Thursday for frosting.

We added the onion mixture to two cans of processed spaghetti sauce, that you would buy in the grocery store.  To give the sauce a little more texture, and to make it more fun to eat, we added a can of diced  tomatoes.  Bringing the sauce to a boil we turned it down, covered it and simmered the mixture for an hour on low heat.

When the sauce cooled, we put it in the refrigerator with the meatballs to wait for Thursday, when we would combine them with pasta for a meal.