An amazing pasta dish made easy with Ragu Super Chunky Mushroom Sauce. 

My maiden name is Garaventa, as Italian as it gets.  My dad was Italian and his Dad was first generation born here in the US. Growing up, pasta was a staple and the best was my grandmother’s spaghetti. It was amazing and I’d like to share my version of her egg noodles with mushroom meatballs with you using Ragu Super Chunky Mushroom Sauce. 

When I was little, the two recipes I remember from my grandma was her prune cake and especially her spaghetti. We didn’t call her grandma. We called her Danu. It came from our older cousins who as babies couldn’t say grandma and this is what they came up with. And it stuck. So, Danu she was and will always be.

My twin sister and I would spend weekends at her place and she would whip up a big batch of spaghetti and it was so good! Her spaghetti was a childhood favorite of ours. We would sit around the family table and eat as much as we could. One of the ways hers was unique is that she used egg noodles instead of spaghetti noodles. But we still called it spaghetti.

When she passed away in 1996, her spaghetti recipe went with her. I have travelled to Europe and drove all through Italy eating pasta, drinking wine and enjoying the Italian culture. Although I ate some amazing food, nothing compared to Danu’s spaghetti. Perhaps it was the love she included as part of her recipe.

Three things she taught me when it comes to making pasta:

• Never put oil or butter in the pasta water. If you do, the sauce won’t stick to the noodles.
• Always save a bit of pasta water to mix back into the drained pasta. It makes it taste better. No idea why, it just does.
• To avoid a boil over, lay a wooden spoon across the top of the pot. The water won’t boil over past the spoon. It works every time. I kid you not.

I recently talked to my mom who gave me some insight into Danu’s recipe. She couldn’t quite remember it but said it had mushrooms in the sauce so I purchased a jar of Ragu Super Chunky Mushroom Sauce as my base for my take on my grandmothers pasta creation.

Did you know that Ragu sauce has no artificial flavors, no artificial colors, and no high fructose corn syrup? I also read that Ragu was started by a women named Assunta Cantisano who was a single mom who sold her sauce from her front porch. My Danu was also a single mother in the 40’s with two children to raise. She was an amazing woman! She had to be very frugal back in the day and I saw she was a lot like Assunta herself. Very scrappy woman!