Summer Tomato Sauce

This week my husband has been very thoughtfully helping me by making tomato sauce from our garden bounty. He loves to garden, and has been faithfully tending the large plot in our backyard all summer. He has grown oodles of peppers, cantaloupe, squash, onions, and lots of tomatoes!

With an 11-month old under foot these days, it's been hard for me to get around to cooking the tomatoes down. But I know that we will really appreciate the sauce during the rest of the year, so I've been feeling a little guilty about not doing something productive with them.

Whenever I thought of boiling them down it seemed like such a complicated process; I thought it would involve skinning the tomatoes, heating water in a huge pot, and then enduring the sweltering kitchen as they boil away for several hours.

But my husband came up with a great idea that was pretty painless! (...Especially since he did it for me!)

He washed the tomatoes in a sink full of water, then cut off the bad spots, core, and stems, and then cut the tomatoes in half. He then packed them into the crock pot and set the crockpot on high overnight. The next day he spooned off most of the extra water and mashed them with a potato masher. After letting the sauce cool, he was ready to place it in the food processor to make it smooth. The last step was to spoon the sauce into sandwich sized ziplock bags and store flattened in the freezer.

He repeated the process for several batches this week, and now we are pretty much set for the rest of the season!

Now I have high plans for that sauce... Just for starters, I can add it to soup broths, use it with a crockpot roast beef dinner, or make a quick pizza sauce out of it. If you want to try this with your garden tomatoes, a couple of recipes from my website that contain tomato sauce are Minestrone Soup and Italian Tomato Cheese Pizza. Making the pizza will definitely be easier with this sauce, because it has already been boiled down ahead of time and just needs spices added.