I finally made a couple things worth sharing. I'll start with this one since you may also be looking for a way to use your abundant tomatoes. We had a bowlful, so I broke one of my own cooking rules and made spaghetti sauce from scratch. It wasn't too bad to make and the sauce turned out pretty well. Lauren had thirds.
Since I had tomatoes and basil in the garden, I doled out the 99 cents for fresh parsley (by the way, what else do I make with fresh parsley?). The recipe is from food.com, but I don't feel like looking for the link. I found it by doing a Bing search for spaghetti sauce with fresh tomatoes.
Fresh Tomato Spaghetti Sauce
4 lbs fresh tomatoes, peeled and chopped
2 medium onions, chopped (I'd peel them too)
4 cloves garlic, minced
1/4 cup fresh basil, chopped
1/4 cup olive oil
1 teaspoon salt
4 sprigs parsley
1 tablespoon sugar
grated parmesan cheese
Heat olive oil in a large iron skillet or heavy saucepan. Add onion, basil, garlic, and salt; saute until onion is tender, 5-7 minutes. Add tomatoes, parsley, and sugar; heat to a boil; reduce heat and simmer, uncovered for about 2 hours, stirring often, or until sauce has thickened. Remove parsley. (Edited to add: at this point, I used an immersion blender to mostly puree the sauce so it was smoother and more like jarred spaghetti sauce.) Serve over spaghetti or other Italian pasta and top with Parmesan cheese.
I read another recipe that said to add half a carrot to reduce the acidity of the tomatoes and add some sweetness, so I did that, and I thought the sauce was almost too sweet. If you do that, I would reduce the sugar a bit.
Ben likes sauce from scratch, but I'm usually the one that is cooking the meal and use the jarred/canned stuff. And, if he does make it, he always adds carrot to it. It is a good way to get more vegetables in a diet.
ReplyDeleteI make my own sauce once a year if I have enough tomatoes. It is so much work for so little sauce. I think I used maybe 10 big tomatoes and got enough sauce for dinner.
ReplyDeleteI agree about the carrot. Last year when I made it, I added half a carrot shredded to add more veggies, and the other half I left uncut. I took out the uncut half and didn't love the results. I didn't bother with carrots at all this time and was happy with the taste.