Spaghetti Sauce Straight From The Vine
We started around 3:30 in the afternoon. I sent the girls to the garden to pick ripe tomatoes.
They are 3 and 4. I've been teaching them to look for red tomatoes that come off the plant easily. They're getting pretty good at this.
The 3 year old had just gotten up from a nap. Hence the teddy bear.
We also got a green pepper.
While they were picking, I got some water boiling.
And put cold water in a dish in the sink. It's important to put the tomatoes straight into cold water after blanching or a lot more than just the skins would come off and they'd be too hot to handle.
We got a pretty good haul of tomatoes, enough to make a decent-sized batch of sauce.
I usually blanch tomatoes for 2 to 3 minutes. If the skins split earlier, I would've taken them out earlier.
I put them in cold water for a few minutes until I could handle them.
While I peeled and cored, my 4 year old did a job highly favored by 4 year olds everywhere: squishing the tomatoes. This was her first chance to really do this thing. Don't let the blond hair fool you: she is not afraid to get her hands dirty.
Obviously having fun with this job. Squishing the tomatoes makes them cook down much faster.
Obviously having fun with this job. Squishing the tomatoes makes them cook down much faster.
The tomatoes were very watery at this point (about 4:00). I got them heating on the stove on medium-high without salt or any other additives.
Adding a splatter screen is highly recommended. Otherwise there would be tomato sauce in places you'd never expect tomato sauce to go. Including the ceiling. True story.
Once the tomatoes start boiling, I usually skim off the heaviest part of the foam that forms on the surface and turn the heat down so they're at a steady simmer instead of a heavy boil. Tomatoes burn quickly.
After about 45 minutes, the tomatoes had cooked down enough that they'd starting to thicken and weren't just tomato juice anymore. At this point, I blended them so we'd have sauce instead of stewed tomatoes. Venting the blender is highly recommended or again, you may have tomatoes on the ceiling when the hot steam blows the lid off the blender. I vented the blender by opening the spout and pulsing the tomatoes a few times to make sure they weren't going to bust the lid before I settled in to the blend option.
While the blender was going, I started browning some Italian-spiced ground turkey we'd gotten on sale ($0.99 for a pound! Woohoo!) at the local Value Center and frozen for just such a time as this. Ground beef or Italian sausage works well here also.
While the meat was browning, I chopped the pepper from the garden, some onion, mushrooms and garlic. I was going to use part of a sweet pepper I had in the fridge, but the green pepper seemed like enough.
There's always a debate about how much garlic to use. If my dad were making this, he would've scoffed at two giant cloves and added three or four more.
After the turkey was browned, I drained it and added it and the blended tomatoes back to the tomato pan, getting them simmering again while I sauteed the vegetables in olive oil.
I like sauteeing the vegetables because it seems like the flavor in the sauce is better and it doesn't have to cook as long to integrate the flavors. I put the bay leaves and garlic in with the vegetables to get some flavor going there as well.
After the vegetables had softened and the onion was beginning to brown, I added them to the sauce/meat mixture along with some other good stuff.
Red wine. A good dose of this really enhances the other flavors. I would say about a quarter cup.
Red wine. A good dose of this really enhances the other flavors. I would say about a quarter cup.
Mixed Italian spices. I really like using fresh basil, but in the process of rearranging our garden this year I removed the herbs from the vegetable garden and didn't get the new herb bed ready in time to start everything from seed like usual. So I don't have my usual supply of fresh herbs this year. I used about a tablespoon of the dried blend and it was pretty good. I really like adding a dash of red pepper or cayenne pepper at this point, but my kids seem pretty sensitive to spicy stuff and I've been leaving that out lately.
Sea salt. I like adding it at the end like this because if I add it earlier while the tomatoes are still cooking down it can get too salty. It's hard to judge where the salt level is going to go while the water is still evaporating. I add about one teaspoon to start and then keep tasting and adding a little more until it's good.
Yum.
Lauren Turner, Wife, Mother, Chief Cook and Bottle Washer, Blogger and Caretaker of Civilization
The completed sauce was finishing off by 5:00. I simmered it on very low until about 5:30 when it had thickened into a good rich sauce. My family had a tradition when I was little that whoever got the bay leaf on their plate had to do dishes. I think it was just an idle threat. Mostly because Dad usually got the bay leaf but didn't do the dishes.
very good and easy recipe... thanks for your post....
You're welcome! It's definitely one of those "to taste" kind of things - my brothers and sisters all learned to make sauce the same way I did and not one of us makes it like the others.
Nice work Mama! Not only is home made pasta sauce delicious, it is also teaching your girls some good sustainability skills. So much more fun & healthy to make your own too. It's coming in to spring in New Zealand can't wait to start planting veges!
Thank you! I wanted to say I read your article about who cares when you send your five year old to school and it's too old for me to be able to give you a meaningful upvote on it, but I think you've got it absolutely right. Going to the beach with you to play with shells is going to do your 5 year old a whole lot more good than learning how to stand in line properly in Kindergarten. This whole thing about, "Oh no, oh no, you've got to get your kid into the perfect daycare so they can go to the perfect preschool for two years so they're ahead in Kindergarten" starts to make my head hurt. My mom once commented to me about halfway through the schooling of her eight children that no matter how "ahead" the youngsters start, it all seems to even out somewhere around 12. The precocious are often not quite so much and the slower ones have caught up just fine. That comment really made an impact on me and I think I feel a lot more relaxed about my kids' academics because of her pointing this out and then my observing the truth of her statement as time went on. I'm way happier right now teaching my kids about tomatoes than teaching them to read early!
I 100% agree with that philosophy <3
Very informative and very inspiring post. We have our own tomatoes at the balcony and zucchini in the garden..its also great combination for spagetti sauce! Thank you for your post, I know what to cook for dinner tonight:-)) And your girls are really cute!
Thank you!
That's fantastic that you've successfully gotten the vegetables growing on the balcony! I've not yet been able to get a yield with the plants in the pots (I think I may not give them enough water and nutrients). I actually made zucchini noodles for my spaghetti with the spiralizer but I showed my husband's plate with the regular pasta.
:-) I would be happy to show you some pictures, especially tomatoes were really great, but my cellphone was stollen few days ago and I didnt save any of the pictures:-(( (So I have no pictures of my balcony garden and unfortunately also no pictures of my 9 months daughter, which is making me really sad and archiving in the ecloud since that day..). I really like to have my own vegetables, especially since we have the baby + its just great to go out to the garden and simply collect the whole dinner there:-)
Aw, sorry to hear about the phone! It's pretty sobering what we all tend to keep on those things these days.
On days I can mostly collect dinner from the garden, I feel very satisfied about growing it.
And now when I red your intro I follow you and go to check your other posts:-)
beautiful baby girl recipe.
please follow me @raihanrahman
The best part about this post, is that I get to eat the spaghetti fresh from the vine to the plate. It's even good as left-overs! Yum is right! @ironshield
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