Nothing tastes better than homemade pasta sauce. No jarred sauced in the world can compare to fresh ingredients slow simmered for hours on the stove in your own kitchen.
I’ve been making homemade sauce for as long as I can remember. When I was younger, I mixed up cans of tomato sauce with paste and canned tomatoes, added spices, onion and garlic. I cooked it for an hour or two, then let it cool to be put into bags for freezing.
At the time, I thought it was the best ever. Apartment living in the 80s didn’t allow for much more than that. Since then, my life has gone through numerous stages- wild and free where I did all my pasta eating at a restaurant; the traveler life where I seldom ate pasta, but when I did, it was probably in a foreign country or at least another state; and finally, the settled life of family, home and garden. That’s when my interest in bulk prepping sauce returned.
Initially, I had a couple of tomato plants in pots. They took off and produced lots of great tomatoes. I processed my harvest but still added canned products to my sauce.
The next year, I planted more tomato plants, various Italian herbs, onions, carrots… Now I didn’t need to add anything that didn’t come out of the garden.
Well, the onions never came out right- kind of scrawny and leggy, so I used store bought onions and garlic. Still, it was more homemade than multiple cans of tomato products.
Since then I’ve tried onions a couple of times to no avail. Ok, so the onions and garlic still come from the store. Jim upped our game by building raised beds so I don’t have to bend over as much. That was a blessing to be sure. It also gave us more garden to work with.
The past few years I carefully planned out my garden beds to account for several tomato varieties, three different pepper types, carrots, zucchini, corn, potatoes, squash and a healthy variety of herbs.
I start planning in January and February, then wait impatiently for spring to come when I can put seeds in the ground, nurture my babies and watch them grow throughout spring and summer.
Now we generally have 14-16 tomato plants in a variety of types cultivated to produce an abundant crop every year. They are all ripening at the same time and I couldn’t be happier. I’ve been very busy making my sauce. Last week, I harvested twelve pounds of tomatoes for sauce.
Yesterday I harvested enough fresh tomatoes, peppers, oregano, thyme, parsley, sage, rosemary, zucchini and carrots to make a batch of sauce. This morning I spent four hours scalding, peeling and processing tomatoes. I then cooked them down, added a small can of tomato paste (otherwise it won’t stick to the pasta), processed all the veggies and added them along with my (ugh) store bought green onion and garlic, garden herbs and a dash or so of kosher salt. I slow simmered this concoction until it became my favorite sauce. Once cooled, I’ll bag it, tag it and add it to the freezer. Is it weird that I derive great pleasure from seeing the carefully labeled bags of sauce lined up like little food soldiers in my freezer?
Oh well, it is what it is.
From winter’s anticipation and planning to early spring’s planting to watching my plants grow and produce all summer to the final harvesting in late summer and early fall to finally cheffing it up, I enjoy every part of my sauce-capade.
The perfect pasta sauce does not come from a jar, but from my heart and garden.
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