Makin' Some Sauce

Well, it's a late night for me.  We had a mandatory school meeting and I honestly am usually not up past this time because I rise at 4am.  But, you know how it goes, when you are so wound up there is no point in sleeping... might as well blog.  And, since I didn't have any real dinner meal earlier, I am stuffing my face with these new chips I found at Aldi's...Clancy's Pita Chips- Parmesan, Garlic and Herb flavored.  Holy cow, I can't even type how good they taste right now.  It's a feel good, bad for me food, and I don't care.

And, this blog is not just about art and furniture remodels.  No, we have a way of life we are learnin' to live, and we are forging our own way and figuring it out one chicken coop at a time.  So, I figured it's a good time for a garden post. 


We DO have farmstyle fancies, you know.  Trying to grow a bunch of our own food, trying to learn how to do things ourselves.  I want to learn how to make my own soap and detergent.  But, right now we're just working on gettin' the food part right.


So this week hubby said we were gonna make some sauce.  For those of you with a garden, you know that everything just decides to ripen all at the same time this time of year.  What to do with 30 something tomatoes??  It was time to make spaghetti sauce.  This was his second attempt this summer and I did make an effort to chronical the endeavor.  His last mission was completed in secret, as he didn't want me to see the giant mess partaking all over the kitchen (like I really care about that, you should see the trunk of my car).  So here goes...

Here's a sampling of a summer harvest.  Obviously, we used way more tomatoes and peppers than pictured, but the colors are truly beautiful.  My husband is the vegetable gardener and has invested his summertime into expanding his garden every year.  This year, our homegrown sauce ingredients included:

tomatoes

green peppers

banana peppers

white onion

red zepplin onion

zuccinis

basil

He began by dicing up the peppers and zuccinis (this was chunky-style sauce in the makin' so he uses however much he wants, there is no set limit as to how many peppers he will use) (that is our typical family way of doing anything, by the way, just figure it out as we go...).  He put a little vegetable oil in the stock pot and just let the greenies saute as I stirred.  He went back to cutting.

He also finely chopped the fresh basil and put that in the pot as well.  Hey, I fully realize here the cutting board is serving a utilitarian function and not one of decoration.  Therefore, let us momentarily revel in her exhuberant self-sacrifice and move on to better pictures.

(Dang, these chips are a third of the way down the bag).

The tomatoes had to be washed, de-stemmed, halved, and quartered.  Then they were ready for the strainer.

This sick puppy came from Farm and Fleet.  (Oh, I almost forgot, turn on your mental sauce-making music.  It should probably be Italian in nature, but a little festive).   So he places the tomatoes in the top form and shoves them down the pipe all the while cranking the crankshaft.  The tomato juice get forced out the strainer holes and into the green bowl.  The seeds and skins get shucked out the side hole into the kitchen pot.  This is a very tedious process.  I was reprimanded several times for takin' pictures instead of helping remove the thicker juice particles off of the strainer with a spatula.  During this task, the tomato juice spits fitfully everywhere, in bursts, and gets on your face, your clothing, and the wall behind you.  Red dots everywhere.

 

 

After the tomatoes are strained, the tomato juice gets poured into the stock pot with the greenies that are still sauteeing.  We also added a spaghetti sauce spice packet that we picked up at the supermarket.  It had a lot of different salts and garlic varieties in it.   The whole pot was set to boil and then simmer for two hours until the sauce thickened a bit.  When cooled, the sauce was ready for freezer packing in plastic containers.  It tasted awesome, I'll admit I sampled.

 

Don't waste your garden veggies!  Try some sauce!  You lika the sauce??!!  I knew you would.  Tune in later for more prairie dove love, or visit my labels for reruns if you can't wait.