Carrie’s Homemade Tomato Sauce

Happy Sunday my fellow home chefs!! I hope you’ve been cooking up a storm since last I posted.

To give you a little background on how I came up with this dish, I’ll take you back three months in the Sperz household. This is the first year my husband and I planted a garden in our backyard and I was so excited thinking of all the vegetables and herbs I would be able to cook with! Tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplants, lettuce, peppers, basil, cilantro, chives, parsley, mint…we were definitely ambitious with our little plot of land.

As any first-time gardener would do we thought we would kill at least ½ of the plants we purchased. So naturally we ended up planting way more than what we should have. For example, since I love tomatoes I thought we should get all kinds of varieties in the hopes that a few would actually survive.  Not only did we plant red ones, but we also included yellow, green and heirlooms as well – 7 plants in all. It sounded like a viable plan at the time…

Lucky for our investment, all of the plants survived. Well, except for the eggplant and cilantro, and three months later the seven tomato plants are producing WAY more tomatoes than any human being should ever eat in a growing season. So in an effort to pawn a few off we shared with friends, neighbors and coworkers and still had more than enough for our own use (mind you, Erik doesn’t eat tomatoes). I had to come up with a creative idea to use a lot of tomatoes - a fine chef challenge - and this tomato sauce does just that. It uses 15 medium to large tomatoes!!! Problem solved.

Now, I made a cook’s big no-no by serving this to guests the first time I made it. Shame on me! Luckily, it went over fantastically. Everyone loved it and could hardly believe I didn’t follow a recipe. Erik even went back for seconds and piled on the red sauce…WHAT?????? Success! I hope you love this as much as we did.

Time from prep to Eating: 2 hours 15 minutes

What You Need:
Cookie sheet
Large sauté pan

The Stuff:
13 to 15 medium to large tomatoes, halved
1 small onion, diced
1 large shallot, diced
3 cloves garlic, minced
½ cup chicken broth, low sodium (or you can use red wine if you prefer)
1 handful of spinach leaves
Olive oil
Salt
Pepper
Italian seasoning

Here’s What You Do:
Slice 13 to 15 medium to large tomatoes in half and place cut side up on a cookie sheet. Drizzle the olive oil, onion, shallot, garlic, salt, pepper and Italian seasoning on top. Roast in the oven for 2 hours at 325 degrees.

Allow the tomatoes to cool then remove the peels. In a sauté pan heat the tomato mixture over medium-high heat, using a wooden spoon to break them apart into smaller pieces. Add ½ cup chicken broth (or the red wine), spinach, and a pinch of salt and pepper. Simmer for 10 minutes.

The sauce pictured above was made from red, yellow, green and heirloom tomatoes.  Your sauce may be more "red" than mine if you use all red tomatoes.

Serve this sauce with any pasta.