Written by: Roscoe |  Print this post and share it with your buddies!

Ingredients:

1 28 oz can chopped tomatoes

1/2 red onion – chopped

garlic – at least a couple cloves, chopped or minced

olive oil

salt and papper

Worcestershire

Cholula (or your favorite hot sauce)

red wine – 1/4 cup or so

honey – tablespoon or so

brown sugar – tablespoon or so

3 beers – to drink

Let’s face it, there’s a reason they invented Home Delivery. A couple reasons, actually. One of them being laziness, the other being a lack of ingredients in the pantry or fridge when you want to cook something.

Laziness Promotes Convenience and Flavor

Bet you didn’t know that, did you? But it’s true. People got a little lazy, so they invented the convenience of Home Delivery. But how, you ask, does that same laziness promote flavor? Well, just look at what happens:

You Really Want To Cook

And you know you can make a pizza that tastes better than most of the pies you can get delivered in 30 minutes or so (if you’re a member of Club Roscoe you can). But you just don’t have the energy or the essentials to make that great pie you want, so your mind tells you the pizza you get from the local take-out will be pretty good anyway. The flavor quotient goes up in proportion to the lazy quotient. It’s a law. Like gravity. You can’t get around it. Unless…

You Have the Ingredients on Hand

And when we’re talking about pizza, it’s easy: always have pita bread in the freezer (see Pita Pizza), always have cheese in the fridge, and always have sauce.The first two are easy. But what about that last one, the sauce?

A Can Or A Jar? How About Neither

There are some canned or jarred pizza sauces that are okay. And if you doctor them up with garlic and Cholula and maybe a little wine, they can actually be good. But that takes some experimentation to get it right, and though there’s nothing wrong with that – the Club Roscoe test kitchens do it all the time – it’s just as easy, and more fun, to…

Make It Yourself

And it’s pretty much guaranteed to be better than anything you can buy in a jar.

Here’s What You Do:

Chop up about half a red onion and a couple good sized cloves of garlic (more is better if you like it), saute’ in olive oil in a small saucepan. Season the onion and garlic with salt and pepper, then add a few good shakes from the Worcestershire bottle, and do the same with the Cholula bottle. Give it a couple minutes, then hit it with some red wine, maybe a quarter cup or so. You’ll probably want to taste that wine, make sure it’s okay. And if it is, keep drinking it as you make the sauce.

Let It Reduce

Let’s face it, this is a personal guesswork type of thing.Roscoe’s guideline is: when the onions are cooked and there’s less liquid than there was before, you’re ready to add the tomatoes. So…

Add the (28 oz can chopped) Tomatoes

Stir it all up and add some herbs. A few good shakes or spoonfuls of basil, oregano, and/or whatever Italian seasoning you have. We want to see the herbs in this sauce, so don’t be afraid to put them in. Then spoon in about half that 6 oz can of tomato paste, and mix it in real good.

A Little Sweetness Never Hurts

Pizza sauce should be sweet, so drop a tablespoon or so of honey into your sauce – yes, it’s sauce now, and it’s yours – then a tablespoon or so of brown sugar. Mix it all up and let it simmer for a while, maybe until you’re finished with that wine. At least a couple beers’ worth. You’ve heard of the two beer roux, well this is the three beer pizza sauce (we already figured you had one going when you started).

Taste It

And keep tasting it. Season as you see fit. When you’re finished with three beers, it’s ready. At this point, you can either use it right now, or store it in the fridge or freezer, to be ready whenever the Pizza Jones hits.