Slow Cooked Vegetarian Pasta Sauce

A combination of a few recipes I’ve seen. This filled my entire 6.5 litre Slow Cooker.

🍲 Slow Cooker Recipe

Ingredients

1 kg carrots (entire bag), diced
500g celery (entire bunch), diced
1kg onions (entire bag), diced
1 aubergine, diced
1 courgette (*depending on size. I used 4 x because they were very small and ended up with the same amount as the aubergine), diced
400g mushrooms (I got Chestnut, one whole pack), chopped
3 x bell peppers (I used red, yellow, orange – but you can use green, too)
400g can of spinach (drained using a metal sieve)
2 x 400g cans chopped tomatoes (and their juices)
2 tablespoons tomato paste
Passata – entire jar (I think it was about 700grams?)
1 tablespoon dried parsley
1 tablespoon dried oregano
1 tablespoon dried basil
1/2 teaspoon dried rosemary (very finely minced if using fresh)
1/2 teaspoon fennel seed

Directions

Sautée all the vegetables until softened. (You may need to do this in batches.) Place all vegetables into the slowcooker, add the rest of the ingredients, and set on Low for 8 hours. When done, you can blend with a stick blender if desired.

My Notes

I probably didn’t need to sautée anything more than the onions in advance, so next time I’ll be lazier about it. For a 'throw it all in and see what happens' recipe, I was pretty impressed with how it turned out. I don’t plan to buy cans/jars of spag sauce anymore. I left the lid off the slowcooker while this was cooling, which might have thickened it up a bit.

Next time, I’ll also try adding some of the below that I’ve seen in other recipes:
garlic (finely minced or crushed)
1/4 teaspoon marjoram
2 bay leaves
1/2 teaspoon onion powder
1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
1/8 teaspoon chili powder
1/8 teaspoon red chili flakes
1 beef bouillon cube, crushed
dried shiitake mushrooms, maybe a handful?
1 teaspoon Worcestershire Sauce (or Maggi seasoning)