What To Do With All Those Tomatoes

If you're like me and decided that it was an excellent idea to plant five tomato plants for two people, you're probably 

1) sick of eating tomatoes, and 
2) stuck with a bumper crop of 'Mortgage Lifters' that weigh around a pound a piece. 

Here's a great way to put those to good use and pack them away for the winter. 

We like to call this "Love Sauce" (a very simple and tasty marinara). 

I've always found that the simple stuff tastes a whole lot better than anything with a thousand fancy ingredients. Just take a few quality simple ingredients and let them shine. 

This recipe will make one pint (16 oz). Multiply at your discretion. 

Marinara "Love Sauce"

You Need: 

1/2 peck* Tomatoes

1 tbsp. Fresh Basil, chopped, to taste

1-2 Garlic cloves, minced or crushed, to taste

1 tsp. Salt, or more to taste

First you will need to peel, seed and juice the tomatoes. It's messy, but I assure you, this sounds like a bigger pain than it is:

Boil a pot of water. Plunge your tomatoes in, two at a time, for exactly 10 seconds. Take a paring knife and core the tomato. The skin should slip off easily. Slice the tomato in half cross-wise through the tomatoquator (not through the stem) and very gently squeeze out the seeds and juice. 

The Sauce: 

Roughly chop the tomato pulp and put it in a large pot. Cover and simmer on medium-low until the tomatoes begin to soften and render more juice. Uncover and mash with a potato masher to break up the pulp. Add about 1 tsp of salt. Simmer, uncovered, until the sauce reduces by about half or more, to your liking (this will take some time--go and watch Law & Order or something), mashing and stirring occasionally. 

I like chunky sauce, so I don't do this, but you can run it through a food mill at this point if you want smoother sauce. An immersion blender works well, too. 

This recipe requires a lot of tasting. Add more salt to taste. Add basil and garlic to taste. Slowly simmer about 5 minutes more.

Store by packing into hot jars and processing** in a boiling water canner*** for 35 minutes, freezing, or refrigerating. Done!

Tip: If you're interested in trying this out but lack the aforementioned "tomatolanche", I recommend purchasing the tomatoes at a farmer's market or even a roadside fruit stand. You can buy "seconds" (fruits that are blemished, bruised, cracked, or otherwise imperfect) that are not only just as delicious in sauce form as their more aesthetically-gifted counterparts, but have the added bonus of being significantly cheaper as well. 

 *What the heck is a peck? A peck is an outdated unit of dry volume used by the old-schoolers to annoy "kids these days". If you haven't bought them in peck form, then 1/2 peck is basically a 1 gallon bucket full, or about 6 pounds. 

**What is this "processing" you speak of? Ok, so this means "canning your stuff". If you're interested in home canning, go to Ball's Fresh Preserving to learn more. This is the online-version of the ubiquitous holy text known as the Ball Blue Book, with all the modern conveniences of things such as a pectin calculator and links to buy supplies. 

***Canning tomato products using the boiling water method requires a bit of added acid. Add 1/4 tsp of citric acid (look for it in the "canning supplies" section) or 1 tsp bottled lemon juice to each 16 oz jar before pouring in your sauce. I think this might be a new thing because I hadn't heard of it until recently, but it's possible I haven't been doing it because I was absent that day in pioneering class. 

and
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