I like the way you think! 
Uh, because $2.49 plus $3.49 is just one cent less than $5.99?
(It’s humiliating that this was really my first thought on reading your question).
For normal spaghetti, I do a tomato sauce: sizzle dried herbs in olive oil, add onions and garlic, add red wine and canned tomatoes, simmer. Sometimes I’ll do mushrooms with the onions; sometimes I’ll add spinach near the end.
For Garlic Noodles, I make about a pound of noodles, saute about a dozen cloves of crushed garlic in olive oil until barely golden, stir the noodles back in, sprinkle liberally with salt, pepper, and parmesan. Sometimes I’ll add chopped garden tomatoes, fresh mozzarella, and/or fresh basil. It’s comfort food that I can eat a ton of.
For Asian noodle salad, I use soba noodles, and I blanch various veggies–carrots, snap peas, asparagus, etc. Cucumbers and tomatoes just get chopped. Here’s the recipe for the sauce:
¼ c. peanut butter
½ c. coconut milk
¼ c. chopped toasted peanuts
2 Tbsp. fish sauce or 1 Tbsp. soy sauce
3 Tbsp. rice vinegar
2 tsp. grated ginger
2 cloves crushed garlic
2 Tbsp. chopped cilantro
Sriracha to taste
LOL. You’re adding one pound each beef and pork to compare it to one pound of sausage. 1 pound total meat is half price if you make your own sausage in the pan.
But yeah, mostly it’s for taste and texture.
Yeah–my second thought was averages, but I wanted to mock myself for my first thought. Anyway, sounds good!
Y’all shopping at Whole Foods for Italian sausage that’s $5.99 a pound and ground pork is $3.49/lb? 
My Dad’s sauce (now my sauce) always contains Italian sausage, beef ribs, chicken thighs and meatballs. I always love the stringy rib and chicken meat on my meatball sandwiches.
I’m not sure how he came up with the recipe; at best you could say his ancestry would be Irish, and he was born in Butte MT. His story is that he had never eaten spaghetti until he was about twenty years old and it was basically tomato sauce mixed with Italian seasoning. I guess he figured it needed a little more meat.
No, but that’s about what they were last time I looked at Jewel.
Then I went to Cermak and bought the cheap stuff.
This is a good pesto:
Arugula Pesto:
2 cups baby arugula or other greens
1 TBSP lemon zest
1 TBSP minced garlic
¼ cup toasted walnut pieces
3 TBSP olive oil
½ tsp kosher salt
¼ tsp ground pepper
We toss the pasta in this, then add raisins, crumbled gorgonzola and chopped walnuts. Howzat?
My mom made a decent spaghetti sauce, but I always thought it could do with a bit more kick, so I made up my own. I generally make it with penne pasta. Here it is:
Ingredients:
1 8-ounce can tomato sauce
1 6-ounce can tomato paste
1 package mild (or hot) italian sausage
1/2 large onion, chopped
1/2 each green and red peppers, chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
2 bay leaves
1/4 habanero pepper, finely chopped (or substitute 1/2 tsp crushed red pepper)
pinch of italian herb mix
2-3 tbsp olive oil
4 tbsp sliced black olives
Boil the italian sausage in salted water for about 15 min., fish them out of the water and let cool so you can cut them up. In the meantime, sautee the onion, garlic and peppers in the olive oil, gently until soft (15-20 min), then add the tomato sauce and tomato paste together and heat gently, stirring occasionally. The reason for both being used is that it gives the sauce the thickness that I prefer. I even thin it out a bit with 3-4 oz. of water. Once the sauce is in, cut up the sausage (thin slices or chunks) and add it to the sauce. Let the sauce simmer while you make the pasta.
Start heating some salted water for the pasta. When it is boiling, that is your cue to add the italian herbs and olives to the sauce. Cook the pasta until al dente, place some pasta on individual plates, then ladle sauce over the pasta. Serve with a bit of black pepper, and with some freshly grated parmesan cheese if you’re flush, some of the cheap stuff from a can if you’re not.
You can play around a bit with the hot peppers and sausage to find the right degree of spiciness, but the black olives and bay leaf are essential.
Cheers.
Easy white cheese and mushroom sauce
4TBSP butter
4 TBSP flour
1 to 1 and 1/2C Half and Half or whole milk
1/2lb. crimini mushrooms, stemmed and sliced
3/4C Parmigiana Reggiano cheese
1/3C mascarpone cheese
Salt
Pepper
Ground nutmeg
Melt butter in a heavy pan, turn heat to med-low and whisk in flour; whisk for a couple of minutes, until ‘blonde’ in color. Whisk in some salt, pepper and nutmeg. Slowly incorporate milk or Half and Half, until sufficiently thick.
Add mushrooms, simmer until mushrooms begin to soften. Slowly incorporate Parm until well-blended; just before removing sauce from heat, fold in mascarpone.
This is a very flexible recipe, sometimes I add some Italian herbs, etc. Depends on what I have handy and what kind of mood we’re in.
We use this sauce on fettuccine, tortellini, or stir it into some cooked short pasta then bake it as a form of mac and cheese.
It’s extra, extra good if you stir in some lump lobster meat at the very end!
I take whole tomatoes and crush them slightly by hand as I add them to the pot. Since the sauce cooks overnight the tomatoes have lots of time to cook down to nice little bits.
If it’s not from a jar, it involves salsa and/or ketchup. And it actually tastes pretty good–better than some jar varieties, at least. I’d have to ask Mom how she does it, but chances are it’s one of those things where she doesn’t really remember, and will never taste the same as hard as I try.
Prego.