Tomato Sauce From Scratch - Easy, Economical, & Tasty

I love this season of plenty. I buy tomatoes fresh almost every week. In winter they taste like cardboard, but I get one or two mostly to add to things as a side, like katchubar. This time of year is amazing for fresh tomatoes. One year I went crazy and canned 3 bushels. I tend to get extreme when I get into the canning season. In the picture below is a bushel of tomatoes so that gives you some idea.

So suffice to say I did not use all that sauce because no matter how hard I tried we don't eat that much sauce. I should have been Italian! If luck is on my side, I will go to Tuscany one day and take a few cooking courses. Why?  Because we all need to dream.

Anyway, I bought a small basket of tomatoes maybe 5 pounds and decided I wanted some fresh tomato sauce. I love the smell of tomatoes cooking down it's like tomato perfume. I proceeded to the garden and clipped some thyme and basil and parsley made a bouquet garni and proceeded to prepare the tomatoes. Rince, core them, and slice into quarters. That is the first picture. I added a little lemon juice to the pan as I always do, a habit from canning days. Then I crushed a few tomatoes to begin to make the liquid in the bottom of the pot. I added a bay leaf and two cloves of garlic and a little olive oil and the bouquet garni and let the sauce simmer all day. In the end, when it had reduced by half I added a little sugar ( to taste ) some salt and a small can of tomato paste.

Here is what it looked like in the jars. I stored it in in the fridge and used half a pint in some meat sauce and some in a small portion of pasta:

As you can see, the sauce was really thick and delicious, I added parmesan after the shot and mixed it all, it was wonderful.

You could easily make this sauce and freeze it.

I hope you enjoy!

~ Hugs from Mum