This is my basic all-purpose tomato sauce recipe. It's nearly-from-scratch cooking, and I recommend you double or triple the recipe if you have a large enough cooking pot and some jars to put it in.
I make no pretensions with this stuff. It's a simple tomato sauce, good for most basic purposes in southern Italian red sauce cuisine. It works just fine on spaghetti or as the tomato component of lasagna, and can even be used as the base for a decent meat sauce.
3 28-oz cans chopped tomatoes
1 medium-sized onion, chopped
6 cloves garlic, crushed or finely chopped
3 bay leaves
1/2 c decent red wine
1/4 c chopped fresh basil
oregano, thyme, red pepper flakes, salt to taste
extra virgin olive oil
cook onions in oil on medium heat until translucent.
add garlic and turn down to low.
Add tomatoes, basil, bay leaves, wine and other herbs; turn back to medium heat and heat until bubbling slightly.
Turn back to low and simmer for 20 minutes.
Options
Obviously fresh plum tomatoes can (and should, if you have them available) be substituted for canned here. A trick I learned for dealing with tomatoes: if you don't want to bother peeling and seeding them, you can simply cut them in half, scoop out the seeds, and run the flesh through the coarsest holes of a cheese grater (as in .25in or so).
Red pepper is optional; I mostly use it only in hot weather.
If you can get your hands on a live bay laurel bush (like I have in a pot on the windowsill), use your own fresh bay leaves instead of the petrified ones on the supermarket shelf. The supermarket leaves have never been known to actually contain anything resembling the vanilla-like flavor of a fresh bay laurel leaf; the difference is quite amazing.
Mix with stir-fried hamburger meat and chopped celery to get the meat sauce component of what many Bay Staters refer to as American chop suey (a term I personally despise).
I've never tried it, but a good approximation of a Greek-style tomato sauce can be made by adding cinnamon and allspice to taste in lieu of the basil, bay, and thyme (you'll want to keep the oregano and cook the whole thing quite a while longer, maybe an hour or so).
