Let me be a food blogger for a moment, will you? I planted a lot of tomatoes in my garden this year and seriously, I have Roma tomatoes coming out of my ears. It’s painful. It’s been kind of a fun little challenge. How can we use them up? One night for dinner, between Derek and I, we ate up 7 tomatoes throughout the whole meal. Pretty impressive, right? Oh, the lycopene coursing through our veins.
Anyway, we all know the best way to use up a ton of tomatoes is sauce, right? A friend at work gave me an awesome marinara sauce that can be made in a slow cooker. Sweet! That means no boiling, peeling the skin and all that crap. So that’s what I did. Call me The Pioneer Woman, cuz here is my photo tutorial for homemade marinara sauce.
First, gather the ingredients. Tomatoes (from my garden), onion, green pepper (from garden), garlic, basil (from garden) and olive oil (from grocery store).
Roughly chop tomatoes. Don’t roughly chop your fingers. Toss all the ingredients into your slow cooker, set it and forget it for the next four hours. Keep forgetting about it and wondering why your house smells like food. Then remember and say aloud, “Yay!”
When its time is done in the Crock Pot, it’s still pretty darn chunky. That’s the cool thing about this recipe – yeah, there’s a lot to chop up, but you can just do a super quick chop because you’re going to be blending it together in the end. In fact, I hardly cut the garlic cloves at all. I’m a rebel like that. Anyway, I am not cool enough to have an immersion blender (I failed the cool exam), so I poured it all CAREFULLY into my blender and just blended for a second or two. For the love of God, make sure the cover is on tightly. Unless you enjoy cleaning marinara sauce off of your ceiling. I do not.
Heat the sauce on the stove and bring to a simmer. Honestly, this sauce was pretty darn watery. See my healthy spinach salad up there (with tomatoes, of course)? My happy little baby spinach leaves became all wilty and grody because the saucy liquid drained into it. If I had had a can of tomato paste, I think that would have taken care of it. And considering I have a ton of this leftover sauce now in my freezer, that is what I’ll do next time. And look! Even Mr. Man enjoyed him some homemade sauce. Hooray for lycopene!
AWholeNotherStory 