Tomato Sauce!

I wish I could say my schedule is turning into something completely manageable and that I'm whizzing through my classes and my house is clean and I'm preparing gourmet meals daily. Yeah. That would be nice.

In reality, we harvested most of the garden over the weekend. I roasted up the remaining beets and those have been a nice "go-to" addition to salads and as side dishes. The second crop of beans were steamed and eaten. Our zucchini and acorn squash plants seems to have rotted. Odd. And our onions never grew. I suspect that perhaps stomping on them (as I was told to do to make them grow big) wasn't the best idea. I won't do it next year. Our broccoli plants never really had broccoli on them. And I have 4 small cabbages sitting on my counter for me to figure out what to do with them. I'm open to suggestions. I'd say it wasn't the best year for the garden.

What we did end up with a lot of were these tiny little plum tomatoes. I was going to can the tomatoes, like I did last year, so I could enjoy them all year long. But the idea of trying to peel a gazillion 1 inch plum tomatoes didn't really excite me. The Brain had been hopping up and down asking me to make tomato sauce so I looked around to see what I could find in the way of a no-peel tomato sauce. Fortunately the Weight Watchers New Complete Cookbook came to my rescue! Yes, a delicious oven roasted tomato sauce from a diet, I mean lifestyle change, book.

And it's really really easy! I just had to quarter all of those tomatoes and put them on parchment lined baking sheets with a chopped up onion and about 6 peeled cloves of garlic. Then I sprayed them with olive oil (I have a Misto, but I'm pretty certain regular cooking spray would work.) Drizzled them with a little balsamic vinegar and salt and pepper and roasted them in a 375 degree F. oven for about an hour, rotating the sheets at the halfway point. Then when they are lightly browned, slightly dried out and smell really yummy, throw it in the food processor and blend it down. I didn't alter the recipe at all so I'm not going to post the exact recipe, but you get the idea.

Yeah, it's a really good and easy way to use up those tomatoes. And it's so yummy that I've been finding excuses to make pasta for lunch as much as I can. The best part is that I can freeze it in handy little used cottage cheese and yogurt containers and then just pull them out and thaw them when life gets a little too crazy for me.