Tomato Sauce

Hubby won't be home until late tonight, and I've got a bunch of tomatoes that need some attention, so I guess tonight I'll make tomato sauce.  I've got to make it work with the stuff that I have and hope for the best.  That works for me.

I thought I had some fresh garlic, but it was far from fresh.  Do you remember the part of the movie where the mummy disintegrates into dust?  That's what my fresh garlic was like.  I had a jar of garlic with about a teaspoon left in it, but that also has been in the fridge too long.  Rather than resort to powdered garlic, I think that I'll just do the maters and some herbs in the sauce and worry about sauted onion and garlic when I go to use the sauce. 

So here's what I'm doing...

I cut up about 6 pounds of  fresh sauce tomatoes (mine are Romas and Opalkas) into larger bite-sized chunks and out them in my big wok-like fry pan (I don't have a dutch oven at the moment or I'd be using that).  I've turned it on at low heat (about medium-low on my stove) and put the cover on.  I grabbed a handful of basil, thyme, chives and parsley out of the herb garden, crushed it up and threw it in there.

After about a half hour, I took the cover off.  The tomatoes are heated through and getting mooshy, and I want some of the liquid to evaporate.  I cooked it for about 2 1/2 hours, until I had to leave to go pick up hubby.  A good deal of the liquid evaporated, and I've got a pretty chunky sauce. 

It's Saturday morning and I just took the sauce out of the fridge and put it back on the stove.  I'd like a little more of the liquid to evaporate, but I think I'm going to leave it chunky rather than squish it through a seive. 

After an hour on the stove (med-low), it's looking pretty good.  It smells pretty good, too.  I've turned it off so that it can cool down.  I started picking the herbs out.  I didn't chop them up, just scruntched them up and threw them in there.  The thyme leaves all fell off the twigs, so they're still in there.  The chives are rather stringlike and the parsley is just big gobs - looks like of like canned spinach.  Some of the basil will stay in there. 

Once it's cool, I'm going to put it in freezer bags, about 2 cups to a bag.  I wish I had a silicone muffin pan.  Freezing the sauce in that would make it really easy to pull just what I need out of the freezer.  I'll have to try that next time. 

FT