From Seed to Sauce

So my husband has this garden--it's huge and fantastic, and, with regards to green beans (am I the only person in the world who hates fresh green beans?) and tomatoes, it's quite prolific. Here's photo proof:

That's about 20 gallons of tomatoes. We've since bagged up 7 more gallons, and, I'm told, there are still more to come. We'll be eating a lot of tomato-y stuff this year...

With the tomatoes threatening to take over my freezer, I decided I should try to start using some of them, so last night for dinner, I decided to make spaghetti. Of course, I would make the sauce from scratch. With no recipe. Because I'm awesome. Awesome-ish.

I started the adventure around 5 pm, and figured I'd have dinner on the table around 6:30 or 7 pm. Yeah. Not so much. More on that, later.

I started with two bags of tomatoes, because I knew that they reduce quite a bit when they're cooked.

I'd been reading all over the internet that all I had to do with these frozen tomatoes was run them under hot water, and the skins would just slide right off. I was more than a little skeptical (nothing is EVER as easy as it's supposed to be, right?), but I threw them in the colander and ran them under hot water. Surprise, surprise! The skins really did just slide off. Seriously. It was kind of gross. But, anyway. So I de-skinned the tomatoes, and put them in a little pot on the stove, so I could start turning them into sauce. 

As the tomatoes thawed, I kind of squished them between my fingers to make them more sauce-y and less tomato-y. And, honestly, I was really hoping that I could get away with not having to drag my blender out. More on that, later, too.

I had originally just de-skinned one bag of tomatoes, because I wasn't sure if I needed two or not, for my sauce, but after not-very-long-at-all, it was quite apparent that I would definitely be needing both bags, so I ended up straining off the stuff that had turned to liquid from the original batch into a larger pot, and adding those chunks to the new batch of de-skinned to tomatoes to continue reducing.

This is the saucy stuff that I strained off from the first batch of tomatoes.

This is the seeds and the chunks leftover after I strained the sauce off.

I alternated between turning the heat up high, and turning it down to medium, because I really didn't know what I was doing (this was where I probably should have consulted google...), so I didn't know exactly how to get the stuff to reduce to the correct consistency. So after about 30 minutes of alternating heat and stirring, I decided to just turn it to medium and leave it alone for a while. 

 I had a good bit of watery sauce at this point.

 I decided to add some fresh basil from the spice pot in our window, since the sauce would need seasoning at eventually, anyway. I threw it in when I checked the consistency after about 45 minutes of simmering on medium heat.

This was an hour and a half into the process. I was nursing a very fussy baby, stirring a very watery sauce, and wondering when the heck this was going to start turning into magical spaghetti sauce. This is my "This is taking waaaay too long" face.

Here's when my 6-year-old came into the house bearing a gift: a teeny-tiny ladybug. Seriously, it was the smallest, ovaliest one I've ever seen. Look, it only has three little spots:

Oh, and my husband dropped these off for me, on my nice, just-cleaned counter:

We had words. 

While I was waiting for the sauce to finish, I fried up some ground beef to add to the sauce (we like our marinara meaty!). I like to cook a small amount of garlic, salt and pepper, and italian herbs right into my meat. It tastes super yummy that way! Meanwhile, my sauce was starting to thicken up to the right consistency:

It went from this...

To this...

And finally, to this. And it only took three hours!!

As I was stirring my sauce all this time, I kept pulling up these mushy, membrane-y tomato chunks from the bottom of my pot. I had this irrational belief that as the sauce thickened, these would melt away into a perfectly textured marinara sauce. Yeah. Didn't happen, so I had to dig around the top of my cupboards to find my blender, clean it up (holy dust, batman!), assemble it, and then pour my steaming hot sauce into it (holy hot tomato sauce burns, batman!). It worked great, though, and after a cycle or two through the blender, the mushy things were gone.

Now I had to season this stuff, which was harder than I imagined since, you know, I'd never actually made sauce straight from tomatoes before. I threw in a few stalks worth of fresh oregano leaves,

a little garlic, a lot of salt, some pepper, crushed red pepper, dried italian seasoning, some onion from the garden, and about a tablespoon of brown sugar. I should have tasted it before adding the sugar because, as it turns out, it was fairly sweet in its own right, and the sugar almost made it too sweet. The husband and I each sampled it when it smelled like a fair representative of spaghetti sauce, and we pronounced it, surprisingly, good. So, at this point, I added it to the browned beef, rinsed out my big pan and set the noodles to boil while I brought the meaty sauce to its final boil.

The sauce and noodles were then assembled in my favorite spaghetti casserole (which I discovered, as I was assembling, had a broken handle. I still used it. I'm not good at change). I smothered my spaghetti, as usual, with mozzarella, parmesan, fresh-ground salt and pepper, and a light dusting of italian seasoning. Then I popped it in the oven to bake at 400º until the cheese spilled over and set off the smoke detector. I mean, until I turned golden brown.

I'm not kidding about the cheese spilling over and setting off the smoke detector. Unfortunately...

And the final product was actually quite tasty. Surprisingly. We accompanied the spaghetti with fresh garden corn, garlic bread (a half-loaf of buttered french bread covered lightly with garlic, salt, parmesan cheese, and italian seasoning), and garden salad, featuring carrots, tomatoes, onions, and cucumbers fresh from the garden. (And yes, I know it's not really a salad once it's buried in cheese, croutons, and bacon bits, but that's the only way I know how to get those greens down me. So leave me alone about it.)

Don't worry, you won't be getting regular installments from my kitchen, I promise. Usually, I slap a frozen pizza on the table and call it good. Which is why I turned one little pot of sauce into an entire blog post--when you don't usually cook, you have to bask when you do, right?

Right?