So being a part of the CSA this year is awesome, but we are getting SO many tomatoes we just don't know what to do with all of them. This last week H decided to make a homemade tomato sauce to use up some of the ripe ones before they went bad. It turned out amazing! You might have noticed this photo on my Instagram this week:
It really tasted like you were biting into a fresh tomato with a hint of garlic and Italian seasoning. It was perfect. Now, being an Italian woman myself, you would think that I would have a family recipe that is tried and true passed down from my grandmother. Well, I don't. I don't think I have ever even tried to make homemade sauce, ok maybe once but it was just 'ok' and was a ton of work! Needless to say when H said he was going to make dinner AND it included homemade tomato sauce I was skeptical to say the least - I thought we would be ordering pizza for dinner instead.
Well, he totally proved me wrong! My hat goes off to you, my wonderful husband, who has now proven that I don't have to be the only one making dinner from now on ; ) Just kidding, he is a big help in the kitchen and has apparently learned a thing or two from yours truly. My only complaint was that he didn't follow a recipe/write anything down so I have no idea how he made it. All I know is it involved a lot of tomatoes, a pound of ground beef/turkey, and a bunch of garlic. So I apologize that I cannot type up this recipe for you guys. But, next time I will keep better track of what he is doing in the kitchen, he might just surprise me again!
We ate dinner that night and after cleaning up, realized that there was a huge pot of sauce left over. We decided to freeze it for a rainy day. So H got out our jars and started filling them. He was so proud of his masterpiece that he didn't want to waste a drop so he filled these jars up to the brim. Now, I mentioned to him to NOT do that because the liquid needed room to expand when it freezes (I would say it's the scientist in me that thinks of these things, but he is a scientist too so he really should have known better). Did he listen? Nope.
A few days later I opened the freezer to find this:
Yup, three jars of sauce whose tops burst in the freezer leaving sauce all over the top shelf. Awesome. At least it doesn't look like the jars cracked, they just dribbled from the top so hopefully it is still salvageable. Just when I was about to relinquish dinner duties to my husband he goes and does this. I guess all is now right with the world, I am still Queen of the Kitchen and he is still my Handyman Extraordinaire : )
Regardless of how the tomato sauce turns out we still had TONS of tomatoes (Roma, Heirloom, Grape, Cherry, Beefsteak) that needed to be used. So I tried my hand at canning today. I totally cheated and used a pre-made salsa packet from Ball. It is still boiling so fingers crossed it turns out ok.
I also made this delicious Heirloom tomato bloody mary mix. Yea, it's a good one! I'll have to post that recipe later on though since this post is getting a bit long as it is. I plan to freeze one of the jars to take with us when we go camping next weekend. The weather looks great as of now, but even if it rains, at least we will have some delish cocktails!
Notice the headspace in the jar,... yea, that's the one for freezing ; )
