Homemade Pasta Sauce – Homegrown

If you’ve been following along here for any length of time, you know we had a bumper crop of tomatoes this year (and I’m hoping for the same this fall).

When we couldn’t keep up with the tomatoes that we were growing, I started freezing them in gallon size bags.  The plan was to make homemade pasta sauce from them.  They sat in the freezer for a while, I think my husband was starting to lose hope in me.  But, alas!  I did it!  I made our first batch of homemade pasta sauce and I have plenty of tomatoes left to make at least one more batch.
Here’s my recipe (which can be easily halved)…

Homemade Pasta Sauce

Ingredients: 
20 tomatoes
4 tbsps olive oil
4 tbsps butter
2 onions
2 green bell peppers
4 carrots, shredded
8 cloves garlic
1/2 cup fresh basil, chopped
1/2 tsp dried Italian seasoning
1/2 cup red wine (the drinking kind, not the cooking kind)
2 bay leaves
4 tbsps tomato paste (I hate using this stuff, but I also don’t have the time to let it cook down right now in my life – maybe someday…)
Directions: 
1.  Peel your tomatoes.  You can do it this way or you can freeze your tomatoes, then let them thaw, and the skin peels right off.  The other benefit of the freezing and thawing is that a lot of the water comes out of the tomatoes while they are thawing, which helps make a thicker sauce.
2.  Chop tomatoes and puree in a blender.
3.  Cook onion, bell pepper, carrot and garlic in the olive oil and butter.
4.  Pour in pureed tomatoes and add all of the rest of the ingredients except the tomato paste.
5.  Bring to a boil, reduce heat, cover and let simmer for two hours.
6.  Add tomato paste and let simmer for two more hours.
7.  Discard bay leaves and serve.