An Abundance of Tomatoes

So many tomatoes! About 7 pounds of them.

When I got back from my extend travels through the Midwest the garden was a mess. Most of the plants were past their prime. There will be another post about the rejuvenation of the garden. There were several tomato plants that were in the last stages of life/the first stages of death so I picked the salvageable tomatoes from them and decided to try my luck at making tomato sauce. The hardest part of this whole process was preparing the tomatoes. First you have to wash them, then blanche them, then chill them, then peel them, then dice them. All of this I did with a huge cut on my thumb so it burned like nobodies business.

The washing.

The boiling.

The chilling.

More chilling.

I didn't take any pictures during the peeling or dicing stages as my hands were covered in tomato innards and there was no photo assistant (Catherine) to help me document the event. Then the easy part started...the making of the spaghetti sauce. I mostly based my sauce off a Cooks.com recipe but added a lot of other great things so here is a lot closer to the "recipe" that I used.

4 cloves garlic
2 lg. onion, chopped
4 tbsp. oil
6 lb. tomatoes
24 oz of tomato paste
2 tbsp. sugar
6ish tsp. instant beef bouillon granules
4 tsp. oregano
2ish tsp. salt
15 fresh basil leaves chopped
1/2 tsp. pepper
2-4ish tsp of Italian seasoning
1 small jar of fire roasted peppers chopped up (throw watery stuff from the jar in there too)
lots and lots of dashes of crushed red pepper flakes

Peel and mince garlic. In large saucepan cook garlic and diced onion in hot oil until tender. Put quartered tomatoes and juice into pot. Add all other ingredients. Bring to a boil. Reduce heat, simmer on low for about 2 hours. I also harvested a lot of cherry and grape tomatoes from other plants and threw them in there whole. Enjoy!

Saucy and delicious!

So chunky and wonderful.