Like everyone else in the known universe, I am seduced by the fantasy of boiling up some simple pasta, opening a jar of tomato sauce, and, before you can say Enrico Caruso, sitting down to a great plate of spaghetti.

Unfortunately, it has never been much more than a fantasy-at least when the word "great" is involved. The jarred stuff I grew up with was pretty awful.

Today, of course, we've come a long way, bambino, from Ragú -- with designer tomato sauces, famous-restaurant tomato sauces, famous-chef tomato sauces, et al, often at dizzying prices.

Are they good? They're better, I usually find-but, as everyone who has ever worked on converting his or her tomato sauce into a shelf-stable commercial product has told me, it is exceedingly difficult to preserve the fresh and lively character of a great tomato sauce when you put it in a jar.

And that is why I'm delighted to tell you about two jarred tomato sauces I recently tasted that rocked my kitchen -- two sauces that finally make the fantasy come true! And the prices are relatively gentle!

The first one does it the old-fashioned way, though I'll be dammed if I can tell you how they figured it out: Ed's Tomato Sauce is great simply because it tastes like fresh tomato sauce in an Italian-American kitchen in about 1963.

This is an enormous accomplishment.

It is rich and sweet, with bits of herbs and small chunks of tomato floating around.

It is also, I'm afraid, not garlicky (the ingredient list does not even include garlic)-but that's easily remedied. I recently sliced up about 4 large garlic cloves, sizzled them in a few tablespoons of olive oil, then stirred in about a cup of Ed's Red-badda bing!

I was also thinking that the juice and chopped meat of about a dozen cherrystone clams would put this thing over the top! The other sauce that has me going needs no fine-tuning at all-it has been tuned by Molto himself, and tuning doesn't get much finer than that.

The strategy behind the Mario Batali All Natural Sugo Finocchiato (Tomato Sauce with Sweet Garlic and Toasted Fennel) is entirely different: if you can't get a brilliantly fresh taste of tomato sauce into a jar, at least you can flavor the tomato sauce brilliantly so it's a great taste experience.

I have literally never tasted a tomato sauce in a jar with this much daring flavor.

The big chunks of garlic do the job well enough . . . but then, BAM! (oops, wrong guy) . . . the profusion of toasty, chewy little fennel seeds that explode with gusto is extraordinary.

If you don't like fennel . . . stay away!

But if you do, you now have in your hands the fixin's for the great bowl of no-fuss pasta you always wanted.