My husband came home from helping his brother in Maine talking about a fantastic tomato sauce that Casey from Friends of Willow made them for dinner. Bill does not like red sauce, so I knew I had to get the recipe from Casey. It turns out that she makes her own sauce without a recipe, and makes it up as she goes along based on whatever ingredients she has around at the time. She gave me a rough outline of what she uses, and how she prepares the sauce. I immediately got to work collecting ingredients from our garden: garlic picked a few weeks ago, onions, fresh basil and of course fresh tomatoes!
Prepping the onions was the most difficult task, because we grow tiny onions. This meant that I had to use a ton of tiny onions. Peeling and chopping all those tiny onions was time consuming.
I used what I would describe as 6-8 medium tomatoes, although i had two enormous tomatoes and a bunch of tiny tomatoes.
Step 1: Remove the skin from the tomatoes by placing them in boiling water for about 30 seconds. Some of my tomatoes were so fresh I needed to cut a tiny x in the bottom of the tomato to get the skin to come off. Then you peel the skin off with your fingers and cut out the cores. Be careful the tomatoes are slippery & hot.
Step 2: In a frying pan with a bit of coconut oil sauté the onions and garlic for a few minutes. I had to constantly remind myself to season things as I go, so at this point I added a few shakes of salt and pepper.
Step 3: Add the whole tomatoes. I don’t mind the seeds so I leave them in. Here is where Casey told me to use the potato masher to smash the tomatoes, so they will cook quicker and preserve the “garden freshness”. Apparently, the longer you cook the sauce the more of that “fresh from the garden taste” you lose. Simmer for 15-20 minutes. I added about a teaspoon of sugar to cut down on some of the acidity from the tomatoes. I also seasoned again, just to be sure. When it was done, I turned off the heat and added a few stems of basil to steep for about 10 minutes and then I removed the wilted basil. I kept all the leaves on the basil stem so I could fish it out easily.
Step 4: Serve. This made a family size portion of sauce, although our boys do not like red sauce.
I would give this recipe 5 out of 5 stars. It is perfect for a small crop of tomatoes. You can make it with as few, or as many tomatoes as you have on hand. Casey said, she also makes this recipe in the winter with canned tomatoes. I love that it involved basic ingredients that I can get from my very own garden. Somewhere up in heaven, my grandfather is enjoying this. He spent a lot of time gardening every summer and canning tomatoes for the winter.
Next up Salsa. We are going to do some canning of the salsa also, at least that is the plan.
Wen.
