I make-a da sauce

Cook those tomatoes into submission...and sauce

 Hey de ho, it's Tips, Tricks and Treats Tuesday and I was speculating on what to write about for today when I thought, Hey!, I bet there's a lot of people out there with an abundance of tomatoes like I have and might like a few ideas on how to use them.  It's always nice to give some of your crop away, but it's also nice to use it, too.  I had already given away a bunch and was thinking of a way to utilize the LARGE bowl I still had. Spaghetti sauce popped in my mind so I Googled away and here's what I came up with...

                           

                             

http://www.food.com/recipe/fresh-tomato-spaghetti-sauce-10837

The link above is for one of the recipes I used to mash together my own recipe. That recipe has the measurement part pretty well down.  The only things I did different were to not use parsley, switched brown sugar for regular sugar, threw in some chopped banana peppers and a small can of tomato paste, which to me was a must to give it a thicker consistency.  Now the video here>>>helped me with the mechanics of making my sauce.  It really was helpful to watch and I recommend it, especially if you never made your own sauce before, such as myself.  The video shows you how to easily get the skin off the tomato but a heads up...when you boil the tomatoes the skin does NOT have to crack for them to be ready to peel.  I think I boiled mine too long but it was just oozier and hotter on the fingers.  Now making spaghetti sauce in this way you will have seeds but I don't see this as a problem at all.  It just won't look like store bought which is actually kinda a plus.  Again, I did use the tomato paste as recommended but I didn't have to thin it out as shown in the video.  I also didn't use meat but it would be a great addition, if you're so inclined.  And experiment!  You could add all sorts of other ingredients like mushrooms, black olives, peppers and la la la la, you get the idea. Serving this with homemade noodles, like I did, makes it extra yummy and hearty. When  I made this for our weekly Family Dinner it went over great!  My son-in-law took extra which was an unspoken compliment that warmed the cockles of my heart :)  Being a Polish (in heritage) Mother, feeding my brood with good things is very important to me.

Close to what I made but not quite

If you want an easy and fast way to use up those bulging red fruits (it really is a fruit...look it up) then try this.  Just chop up your 'matoes and add chopped green olives, fresh basil (or dry is fine) and enough Italian dressing to get it all coated which really isn't a lot.  This "recipe" is great because you can tweak it all over the place; add other ingredients like onion or delete the green olives and add black ones; switch out Italian dressing for Catalina, for example; or leave out the tomato altogether...naw, that'd be silly!  I just threw that last one in for fun. This is super good over cooked fish, by the way, or it would probably be a nice chunky spaghetti sauce warmed up.

Anyway, have food-fun with these ideas and enjoy those chubby, rouge-colored juice-bombs while they're still abundantly here :)