For lunch today, I decided to be cute and make something fresh for my wife and I for lunch. Lately, whenever she has just wanted something quick to eat, she would grab herself a can of SpaghettiOs and dig in. I miss eating them! I use to enjoy them both when I was younger and as an adult but since they all contain wheat for the pasta, they no longer can be my quick treat. I used to eat them right out of the can. I preferred Chef Boyardee to Franco-American (now owned by Campbells), but now I can't have any of them. There is one I ad seen that comes in a pouch for kids that is gluten-free, but for $3, I will pass on it. They didn't even have any discounted at the closing stores for me to try for the blog.
So anyways, I started to search online, looking for a homemade SpaghettiOs recipe. I found two that seemed to each look like they would be awesome, but they had their differences. One called for tomato sauce and the other tomato soup. Another difference was that one called for freshly shredded sharp cheddar yet the other just said to use Velveeta. Here are the two recipes with links to where they can be found. Please note that neither of these recipes is gluten free, but they can easily be tweaked to make them safe.
Recipe #1 from the blog "Oven Love"
6 cups canned tomato sauce
3-4 cups water
2-3 teaspoons garlic powder (depending on how garlicky you like it)
1 lb bag anelletti (ring shaped pasta- you could use any small pasta- alphabet or stars would be fun!)
1-1 1/2 cup sharp cheddar cheese, shredded (fresh shredded is best!)
1/4-1/2 cup milk
2 tbs butter
salt, to taste
1. Combine tomato sauce, water and garlic powder in a large pot. Bring to a boil.
2. When the tomato mixture is boiling, add the pasta to the pot. Cook, stirring frequently (the pasta is tiny, so it's easy to stick to the bottom) for about 20 minutes, or until the pasta is soft.
3. Stir in cheese until melted. Add milk, butter and salt to taste. Taste it, check it out, see how you like the flavors. Then enjoy it!
Recipe #2 from a forum on www.recipesecrets.net
Homemade SpaghettiOs
3 cans tomato soup
1 can water
1 can milk
1 lb. small pasta rings, alphabets, or stars
6 oz. shredded velveeta cheese
salt
Cook and drain pasta according to package. Mix all ingredients together, heat through until cheese is melted.
Serves 6
I didn't have a lot of time to make #1 and I accidentally bought the soup for #2 when I had intended on making #1, so I blended the two recipes together and used gluten free pasta. Here is what mine looked like:
3 cans tomato soup
1 can water
1 can 1% milk
1 lb Schar's GF Anellini
6 oz. shredded Mexican Cheese mix (it contained cheddar, all I had on-hand)
about 1-2 tsp. of Garlic Powder
about 1-2 tsp. of Paprika (ingredients on SpaghettiOs have paprika in them)
For cooking this, I followed the #2 recipe's directions.
My modified version of these two recipes did not produce homemade SpaghettiOs. I had my wife taste it as she had just had a can of Spaghetti-O's about two days ago, so she was the best person to give me an honest answer. She told me it tasted nothing like them....but it tasted exactly like Chef Boyardee. I will still call this a success, even if the way I made it came out to taste like the competition.
Concerning the aforementioned struggles, I made one fatal flaw in making this recipe today. Neither one of these recipes was GF to start, but I figured that replacing the pasta would have changed it into something I could have eaten. Boy was I wrong and I will be feeling it later. If only I had just followed Recipe #1 a bit more and used tomato sauce, I wouldn't have ingested a good amount of gluten. I really hate that so many canned soups companies use wheat flour to thicken their soups.
Yet another lesson in learning to read the labels and to not assume that it is GF until you verify it.
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