I love to cook. When I'm home, my mom and I cook all the time, from old favorites to weird new recipes. While I might not be the best cook in the world (yeah right), I have a lot of fun when I cook and this is my all-time favorite thing to cook because it's super easy to make, it always tastes good, and it makes me feel like I'm at home.
You will need:
- Pasta of your choice (I use spaghetti, obvs)
- bread (duhh)
- butter
- olive oil
- tasty, fruity red wine (another duh)
- a spoonful of sugar (makes the medicine go down)
- oregano
- salt & pepper
- 1 big can of crushed tomatoes
- 1 onion, chopped
- 1 shallot, chopped
- garlic (your call - I use loads), chopped
- red pepper flakes (optional)
Preparation
To begin, heat some olive oil and a bit of butter in a large saucepan (or a giant pot if, like me, that's all you have) and toss in the chopped onion, shallot, and garlic. Cook these until the butter is fully melted and all the ingredients are soft and semi-translucent.
Then, pour in your can o' tomatoes.
I like to use crushed tomatoes because I prefer a chunkier sauce (plus it tends to be more tomato-y), but you can use pureed tomatoes if you like a smoother sauce. Remember - the onions will cause chunks in your sauce if you cut them too big or don't cook them long enough!
Now, the fun part. If you haven't already poured yourself a glass of wine, do it now, because I'm sure you feel like you deserve it after a good onion cry. This part - spicing up your sauce - is entirely up to your tastes. I usually take a few sips of my red wine before pouring the rest of the glass into the sauce.* At this point, I add the sugar, oregano, and salt & pepper. I also add a generous amount of red pepper flakes here because I love the fight between the heat of the red pepper and the sweetness of the wine and sugar. But again - this is your sauce.
Make it your own! 
Let this sauce simmer, uncovered, for as long as it takes to get to optimum viscosity. Ten points for that word! I don't like to start cooking my pasta until my sauce is simmering, so they finish at around the same time. After draining the pasta, it goes directly into the sauce so every noodle can bathe in tomato-y goodness.
Normally, my spaghetti story ends here, but on the particular occasion that my friend Laura took these photos, we decided to make meatballs and garlic bread as well. If you want to make the meatballs, take a shallot, some garlic, and about half an onio
n and grate them into a bowl with some ground meat - we used beef, but you could use pretty much anything. I think beef and pork would work best in this situation. Add to that bowl spices of your choice (salt & pepper, etc... of course red pepper flakes. that's-a spicy meatball!), grated parmesan cheese and breadcrumbs (I used ones with garlic and 
parsley added), and using your hands (ew), mix it all up with one egg. I added a picture of when I mixed the meatballs because I know my mom won't believe I actually touched raw meat by choice. To cook the meatballs, I cooked them in a pan with olive oil until they were a nice brown color, then put them on a pan and cooked them in the oven on low heat for about ten minutes, turning them over halfway through. Once finished, the meatballs also went directly into the sauce with the cooked spaghetti.
To make the garlic bread, we cut a loaf of bread in half to make two long slices, rubbed the surface with garlic, drizzled olive oil all over them, and layered very thin slices of butter across the top, and sprinkled it with parmesan cheese and the leftover garlic pieces. This went into the oven for about five minutes as the meatballs finished cooking and came out crunchy and delicious.
So, there you have it! My not-so secret spaghetti recipe! I make this at least once a month and if nobody is around to eat it, the entire batch makes about five or six meals.
*Don't tell my Uncle Dave about that. He would shut down my kitchen.
