That Was Meaty

With all the chicken and shrimp recipes we’ve been doing, it was nice to finally get a pasta recipe to try. Well, it’s not actually a pasta recipe, but a recipe for spaghetti sauce. Paula Deen’s recipe for Alice Jo’s Spaghetti Sauce looked pretty simple so it was perfect for me to test out on a busy weeknight!

(Sorry in advance for the lack of pictures, but Blogger was giving me major trouble when I was trying to load them. At least you get to see the first and the last pic!)

I switched the meat to lean ground turkey and used about 2/3 of what the recipe calls for. I added some diced carrots to make up for the bulk and omitted the salt. I wanted to use all reduced sodium tomato products, but when I went to the store I could only find No Added Salt Tomato Sauce (I guess that’s what I get for going early on a Sunday morning when the whole store was picked over).

The recipe was pretty simple, just a lot of chopping. I finally got it all chopped and cooked and set it to simmering while I worked on cooking up some pasta. One of these days I’m going to try spaghetti squash, but until then, I’m in love with this Barilla pasta made with a flour/bean flour blend.

The final product . . .

It tasted pretty good. It was really meaty. Not really “meaty” from the sauce, but really chunky. I think I tend to prefer my spaghetti sauce a little bit saucier. I actually used some of it a couple days later on a pita pizza and it was just too chunky and the flavors took away from the pizza taste I was looking for (because you know I love me some pizza!)

Nutritionally speaking, the lightened up version has less calories and fat. It was amazing to see how much switching to a leaner meat and using less of it actually impacted the nutrition stats! Even though I didn’t end up using reduced sodium tomato products, my version is lower in salt, just from omitting the 1 tsp that the original recipe calls for!

Nutritional Information (OLD)	Nutritional Information (NEW)
Servings Per Recipe: 8	Servings Per Recipe: 8
Amount Per Serving	Amount Per Serving
Calories: 351	Calories: 152
Fat: 23 g	Fat: 4.4 g
Sodium: 1009 mg	Sodium: 593 mg
Fiber: 3.6 g	Fiber: 4.1 g

Here’s the recipe!

Chunky Spaghetti Sauce

1 lb lean ground turkey
1 large onion, chopped
1 green bell pepper, chopped
1 carrot, diced (about 1/2 c)
1 clove garlic, chopped
2 (6 oz) cans tomato paste
1 (8 oz) can tomato sauce
1 (14.5 oz) can diced tomatoes, No Added Salt
1 tbsp Italian Seasoning
1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
2 tbsp Splenda
1 c water

Brown the ground turkey in a large pot and drain any fat. Add the onion, bell pepper, carrots and garlic clove and sauté for about 5 minutes. Add the tomato paste, tomato sauce, diced tomatoes, seasonings and water. Simmer for 30 minutes and serve with your favorite spaghetti.