Monday is Spaghetti Monday in our house, and at the last week of the farmer’s market here in my town, I bought some awesome tomatoes from a local farmer. I got five of them for five dollars; they were pretty big, and even if it was a little pricey that have a great taste and texture for spaghetti sauces. Yesterday I ended up making the sauce early and serving it with some chicken breast and green beans. I have a new habit of saving my jars from things like Miracle Whip (which I’ve cut out of my diet, mind you), etc., so I got to put it in an old spaghetti sauce jar. Here’s what I did:
Ingredients:
- Four large tomatoes (I ended up eating one of the five on sandwiches last week…)
- 3/4 Water
- 1 T Italian seasoning
- 1/2 t Garlic salt
- 1 can (6 oz.) tomato paste – mine happened to be an organic brand I had around
- 2 T Vinegar (less to taste; we tend to like the taste of vinegar around here)
- 1 T Sugar
- 1 T Extra Virgin Olive Oil
I chopped up the tomatoes into sections, then put them in a rather large pot with the water, Italian seasoning, toamto paste, and garlic salt. I let the tomatoes simmer a bit in the water, about an hour (we were rearranging furniture while it was cooking). When they got pretty wrinkly, I started smooshing them up with a plastic spoon so that there were smaller chunks.
Again, I let the sauce simmer, probably about another half an hour, until I could smell the aroma from the pot. =) Warning, it smells really good, so make sure you’re not too hungry. Then I added in the vinegar, sugar, and lastly, the EVOO. The EVOO provides monounsaturated fat, something that’s supposed to be really good for you. Another half an hour, and dinner was served!
The chicken was pretty simple; just chicken breasts sprayed with canola oil and given some rotisserie chicken seasoning. But the dinner was great! We plan on growing tomatoes in a container garden this spring/summer/upcoming year, so I’ll be collecting more jars and making this a definite staple.