Our Own Pasta Sauce

It's been a few weeks since we made this, but I seem to be getting caught up on blogging lately. 

Right after my recent post on cutting out processed foods we had a bunch of tomatoes ripen in the garden.  We almost always make our own pasta sauce during the summer, and this was clearly the right time to get that done.

Our Roma tomato plants are clearly indeterminate.  We always seem to have a bunch ripening, but never all at once.  Here is what we had for our pasta sauce from our own garden.

We bought two more 10 lb baskets of tomatoes at the farmers market.  They were seconds, so the outsides were not as pretty, they were $10 per basket.  We also brought home veggies to include in the sauce.  My sauce is always vegetarian, while Alain makes a meat sauce.  Look how big that zuchinni is, I paid a whopping 75 cents for that thing!  We also added carrots, celery and onions, which we already had in the fridge.

Here is the big pot of peeled and cored tomatoes.  We boiled each tomato for about 30 seconds to make peeling them really easy.

Alain mashed up the tomatoes and we added the veggies, some tomato paste and eventually Alain added the meat to his sauce.  Here is how it looked boiling down.  The big pot is Alain's, the two smaller pots are mine.

The pots boiled down all day long,  We refrigerated them over night and the next day divided them into single servings in plastic tupperware.  We freeze these individually and than bag them all up and store them in our big freezer in the basement.  Right now we have a whole shelf of pasta sauce!

I know we could can the sauce, we've considered it.  We do, however, like the ease that our freezing method provides.  We just grab a single serving of pasta sauce and heat it on the stove for a few minutes before serving.  It's just very easy!  I know we have to pay to run the freezer, but we bought the most efficient model we could find (an upright) and we free lots of stuff to use through out the year.  For us, freezing is totally worth it.

We've eaten pasta with our sauce a few times now, it is so yummy. I think we each have about 30 servings frozen, so that should last us a good while!