Homemade Spaghetti Sauce
Fresh Garden Tomatoes Make the Perfect Italian Sauce
One of the joys of summer is the bounty of ripe red tomatoes on the vine. The abundant tomatoes are great to slice up and add to grilled hamburgers, toss on salad greens from the garden, and pass along to friends. But perhaps the favored use of garden tomatoes is to cook up a thick, tasty spaghetti sauce. The following are two recipes to meet various needs. Each recipe can be tweaked to suit your tastes. The first recipe is for a fast sauce ready in a few minutes for tonight's meal. The second sauce can be doubled or tripled and uses up a lot of tomatoes to allow for a meal tonight and many nights to come due to easy freezing.
Quick Fresh-Tomato Spaghetti Sauce
Try this recipe with your choice of noodles, from the thin spaghetti to a hearty rigatoni.
- Two garden fresh tomatoes, two handfuls of cherry tomatoes, OR two handfuls of Roma tomatoes
- 1 to 2 teaspoons of Italian seasonings. May substitute with fresh garden herbs
- 1 tablespoon of olive oil
- Handful of ripe, pitted, and sliced Kalamata olives
- 1 green pepper, diced
- 1 teaspoon capers
Dice the tomatoes, removing stems and seeds. If using cherry tomatoes, halve them. In a pan, add the olive oil, seasonings, and tomatoes. Stir over medium heat for approximately five minutes. Toss in the olives, peppers, and capers. Heat approximately five minutes more. Serve over hot noodles.
Slow-Simmered Fresh-Tomato Spaghetti Sauce (Freezable)
This recipe provides a great way to use up garden tomatoes. You can make a batch for tonight's dinner and extra batches to pour into storage baggies, plastic tubs, or glass jars to store in the freezer. Label each container with the date you stored it. That way you can use up the oldest dates first and also recall the hot summer day when you prepraed the sauce. Sauces can keep for more than a year in the deep freeze. Remember to taste test and add ingredients as needed to truly make it your own.
- 8 cups of fresh garden tomatoes, prepared (see below)
- 15 oz of Hunt's tomato sauce
- 2 cloves of garlic
- 1/2 cup of minced onion
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 1 teaspoon basil
- 1/2 cup of water
- Dash of sugar (optional)
- Splash of red wine (optional)
To prepare the tomatoes for the sauce, first heat a pot of boiling water. Carefully dunk the tomatoes in and remove in 1 minute. Now put the tomatoes in a bowl of ice water. The skins will slide off easily. Next, cut the tomatoes in half and squeeze out the excess water and seeds. Take the tomatoes and place in a large pot. You can cut them if you wish but they should break up as you simmer them. Add the tomato sauce, garlic, onion, salt, basil, and water. Simmer the sauce for approximately two hours. Taste the sauce and add more ingredients to your taste, such as sugar or red wine. Stir the sauce occasionally to make sure the tomatoes are breaking up and the sauce has thickened. The spaghetti sauce is now ready to eat or to be put in containers for the freezer.
