Blaire's Awesome Sauce

A sauce that's chock full of veggies and pretty easy to make!

In April, I shared the official recipe for Blaire's dairy-free chocolate chip brownies with you, and spoke about how this year's Girl of the Year has to deal with the frustration of developing lactose intolerance, which means a lot of adapting for this aspiring chef. In her second book, Blaire Cooks Up a Plan, her primary theme makes a pretty big shift, from adapting to food intolerance (and a sort of half hearted attempt at discussing screen addiction) to confronting food insecurity by helping those in need. 

This recipe is inspired by Blaire's community service project, and is featured as a recipe in the back of Blaire Cooks Up a Plan the same way the brownies were. Read on to find out more about this recipe, as well as how to make it yourself!

Blaire lives on a farm, meaning she's got access to a lot of fresh veggies and other products pretty much whenever she wants. Her family is also comfortably middle class, meaning she's never had to worry about where her next meal was coming from. After visiting her local food pantry, she quickly learns in her second book that not everyone is so fortunate, and she decides she wants to find ways to help. 

At first, she offers to make recipe cards for fun ways to incorporate vegetables into different meals, giving visitors to the food pantry new ideas for how to prepare donated food. Although these are a hit, Blaire realizes a flaw in the plan: the food pantry doesn't always have the ingredients available to make these recipes, as their stock depends on what people donate. If no one donates broccoli, there's no way for a patron to go home and make Blaire's famous broccoli cheddar soup, also known as "Hug in a Bowl". 

Blaire realizes another, possibly more meaningful way to help the food pantry would be to make something people can take home and immediately turn into a healthy, satisfying meal for their families, so she convinces her class and mom to help her make a big batch of her mother's famous confetti pasta sauce, so named because it has a ton of chopped veggies in it, making it many different colors. After some typical AG friend drama, the donation is a success, and a video Blaire's friend Eli makes about the process raises awareness about the food pantry. The pantry gets a huge donation, which allows them to start offering cooking classes and training programs for people looking to get jobs in the food industry.

It's a cute story, and in some ways, I definitely liked it more than her first book. I think an issue with the Girl of the Year books is usually a lack of coherent theme from book to book, almost like the author knows they're getting a first book, but book two (or three) comes as a surprise, and then they're scrambling to come up with a relevant plot. Blaire's screen addiction is barely mentioned at all in the second book, making it sort of weird that they tried marketing her as a character who's dealing with that issue as well. But I've always liked how American Girl has tried to show girls that they can make a real difference in their community, and hope the books have continued to inspire kids to find ways to give back and stick up for people who need an extra hand. 

The recipe for Awesome Sauce featured in Blaire Cooks Up a Plan creates a really impressive amount of sauce, and is clearly meant to be something you make in a batch and store for later. Good idea if you're looking to serve a huge crowd or donate some to a local food pantry like Blaire, but not ideal if you're tight on space in a small apartment. I ended up halving the recipe to help save space in our fridge. 

Buying everything can also definitely be expensive depending on where you are and what food you have access to. Blaire's books touch on this briefly, but a big part of food insecurity is pricing. Fresh veggies can be a big money sink, which is why many people turn to canned or frozen vegetables, or just go without. 

To start, heat about 1/8 of a cup of olive oil over medium heat. Then add 1/2 cup of chopped onions, 3 minced cloves of garlic, 1/2 cup of carrots, peeled and chopped, 1/2 cup of diced red pepper, and 1/2 cup of diced zucchini. This cooks for about 6 to 8 minutes, or until the veggies are soft. 

I tried to keep my veggies uniformly small, to give it more of a confetti appearance like Blaire describes her mom's sauce in the book. It made for a very pretty pot of vegetables!

Next, add 2 1/2 cups of chopped fresh tomato. Now, here's where we cheated: we used canned tomatoes to help supplement our fresh tomatoes instead of buying enough fresh ones to meet the measurement requirement. If tomatoes aren't in season, or if the tomatoes at your store are on the pricey side, this is the way I'd recommend going. The end flavor was still quite tasty, and given how bland store bought tomatoes can be, sometimes using canned can be a good option for increasing flavor in sauces. Sorry Blaire, not all of us live on a farm. 

Here you also add in salt, pepper, dried parsley, oregano, and dried basil. Bring the sauce to a boil, and then reduce the heat until it's simmering. It's then left to cook for two hours.

After two hours, it was still looking pretty chunky. The recipe recommends cooking it for another 30 minutes if you want a smoother sauce, so I decided to give it a shot.

It really didn't look any smoother after that additional half hour. If anything, it looked chunkier because more liquid had cooked off.

Take it off the heat and let it cool if you're planning on jarring it. Otherwise, serve it hot over your favorite pasta, or as a marinara dipping sauce as the book recommends. 

So, was Awesome Sauce awesome?

Honestly, it was pretty good! Despite having an Italian grandma, I've never attempted making pasta sauce from scratch before and was always led to believe that it was an enormous hassle to do. My mom remembers my great grandma laboring over her sauce for hours, and that her own attempts at recreating Nana's sauce never lived up to the real thing. 

I think her sauce is probably more complicated than Blaire's, but this was a nice sauce in all honesty. Flavorful, with lots of vegetables, and the prep really wasn't too hard. Chopping the vegetables is the most frustrating and time consuming part of the dish, and it's definitely not something you should let an inexperienced chef tackle by themselves. It does seem feasible as something a class of older kids could make with adult assistance, as it's basically chop everything up, put it in a pot, and leave it alone on the stove for two hours. Kids who feel less comfortable with knives could help wash and prep veggies for chopping. 

Even halving the recipe, this made a lot of pasta sauce. We ate well on the leftovers for a while after we made it, and it reheated well after being in the fridge. While I do have favorite jarred pasta sauce brands (well, just the one...), if I'm ever inclined to make my sauce from scratch again, I definitely think I might be giving Awesome Sauce another try. 

Plus, it's 100% dairy free, meaning Blaire can still enjoy it without any ill effects!

Which is more than can be said for some of the other official AG Blaire products and experiences!