Crock Pot Spaghetti Sauce

A friend of mine, Beth, and I were swapping Crock Pot recipes at the fair back in August, and she told me that she puts her Crock Pot to work making spaghetti sauce while she spends the day teaching 5th grade.  When she comes home, she'll make spaghetti for supper, whip up a quick lasagna for another day, and then freeze the left-over sauce for a couple more meals!   Her Crock Pot is nice enough to make her not 1, but 4 meals while she's away for the day!  How nice is that?!?!?! 

I tried it out last weekend, and sure enough, Beth's onto something!  I started off by frying up 2 pounds of hamburger with 1 onion (sliced into rings for easy picking-out by the kids who aren't huge onion fans), then I dumped into the Crock Pot: 3 (28 oz.) cans of tomato sauce, 1 (28 oz.) can of diced tomatoes, 3 cloves of minced garlic, the meat mixture (drained, of course) and some other random spices I had in the cupboard (I used bay leaf and oregano).  I turned it on high and let it simmer all afternoon (about 4 hours).  Beth lets hers cook on low for 8-10 hours.  The house smelled delicious all afternoon and supper was a snap! 

Before supper while I was cooking the spaghetti, I made a lasagna, (I never cook lasagna noodles, by the way,) and stuck that in the freezer for next week (Homecoming week!!!) .  I ended up with 2 quart-sized jars of left-over sauce.  A quart will go toward a big pot of spaghetti later this fall or this winter, and the other jar (which wasn't complete full) will be perfect for over top of ravioli. 

I found that the sauce was a little more runny than I'm used to, but Dave said that that's the way he prefers it, and I think that this will definitely benefit my lasagna which tends to be a little dry, anyway.  All in all, this was a huge hit!  Like Beth said, this is also very economical!  In fact, our local grocery store has canned tomatoes of all sorts on sale this week for $0.89.  Aside from the meat and seasonings cost, I think this is WAY cheaper and WAY more delicious than store bought sauces!!!

Thanks again, Beth!