We finally have a bunch of tomatoes to call our own. I give all the credit to the man who started the tomato plants, he happens to have a Doctorate in Agriculture!! We've got three plants with at least 20 more tomatoes that will be ready to pick in a week or so. We've already gotten at least 15 tomatoes from the plants. Along with lots of tomatoes comes a need to use them. My kids can eat them like apples and they do for lunch sometimes, but when you get 10 tomatoes all at once you've gotta do something else with them besides putting them on sandwiches and just letting the kids eat them.
I decided I needed to make some spaghetti sauce. I did a google search for a good spaghetti sauce and most of the ones I found made their sauce with canned tomatoes. So I looked at a few more and then decided to do my own thing with some suggestions from a few of the recipes I read. So, here's my version of Garden Fresh Spaghetti Sauce. Feel free to add or subtract from this recipe, I just used what I had on hand and it tasted pretty good in the end.
Ingredients:
1 onion
2 green onions
handful of baby carrots
1 zucchini
1/2 tsp minced garlic
oreganodried basil
2 large and 8 small tomatoes
2 tbsp white sugar
small can of tomato paste
dash of brown sugar at the end
I put the onion, green onions, carrots, and zucchini in the food processor and blended till everything was pretty small. I did add a little olive oil just to get things going. Then in a large pan I heated a little bit of olive oil and then added the veggies and cooked them for 10 minutes. This is also when I added the garlic, oregano and basil.
I cut the tomatoes into fourths before putting them in the food pro. I just pulsed it a few times because I didn't want tomato mush. I wanted the sauce to have a little bit of a texture.
Then I added the tomatoes to the veggies that had been cooking for 10 minutes and also added a little bit of white sugar, and the can of tomato paste. I let the sauce cook for about 40 minutes. The longer the better!! At the end I ended up adding a little bit of brown sugar because the sauce still seemed a little acidic to me.
I cooked up some Garden Fresh Fettuccine Noodles and we were all set. I also added a little cooked chicken to the spaghetti to give us some protein. I'm cheap so I buy the big bags of flash frozen chicken breast or tenderloins from the grocery store and then throw a bunch in the crock-pot...some I'll use right away and some I'll save for later in the week when I know I'll need chicken but may not have time to cook it. Saves me a lot of time. Plus it's nice to have cooked chicken on hand for salads and such.
I had plenty of sauce for dinner and I was also able to freeze some for another meal!!
We also had some farmers market green beans! Delicious!!
And no one even knows that I put a whole zucchini (also from the farmers market) and carrots in the sauce...so don't tell them, it'll be our little secret!
