saucy!

the tomatoes have been piling up here. between the farm's beautiful heirlooms and our 100% seconds crop, the window sill has runneth over. all week i hoped that we would have a chance to make sauce this weekend. all the stars lined up and my dream came true. there is a lesson here, aim low, and dreams come true!

we busted out the squeeze-o, which is an old-as-dirt machine used for seperating the "poop" from the good stuff. it belonged to D's parents and was used to make many batches of sauce back in the day. it is a treasure. the squeeze-o attaches to the counter and as you crank whole (or crudely chopped) tomatoes through, it shoots the skins, seeds and random crap through one end, and the sweet stuff through the other end.

our recipe for sauce was roughly this:

about 20 tomatoes of all shapes, colors and sizes- seeded, skinned and crushed

one onion diced

6 cloves of garlic, crushed

3 cups of basil, purred

3 sprigs of rosemary, chopped

8 sprigs of thyme leaves

1 cup of parsley, chopped

1 cup of celery, chopped

1 leek, chopped

a lot of olive oil

a few pinches of sugar

a bunch of shakes of salt

we basically sauteed everything but the tomatoes, then added the tomatoes, plus the salt and sugar. we let the whole thing cook for a long time.
a very long time. maybe 4 hours. this is what it looked like at the end:

it reduced by so much, about 2 inches down the pan. we added a bit of paste at the end, just whatever we had left in the fridge. even without the paste it was thick as hell. so satisfying! the sauce tastes awesome and i am so excited to do it again, maybe with a different variation. we froze this batch, but i would like to can the next.