1 post tagged “sauce”

I haven't had a lot of time for updating recently because work is so busy. However, I was thinking about making some tomato sauce this morning and remembered that I hadn't even updated about the first sauce I made a few weeks ago. One of the main reasons we grew our own roma tomatoes this summer was to have some to make really good pasta sauce on the cheap. So, after our first harvest, I decided to give it a try and see how it turned out. I cheated a bit and used a few farmer's market tomatoes in the first batch, since I only had 4 ripe tomatoes at the time, but the 2nd batch is all from our own tomatoes from the garden :)

First, I sliced all the tomatoes in half and laid them in a single layer in a roasting pan. I drizzled olive oil over them and sprinkled liberally with salt and pepper. Then I chopped up some onions, garlic, and oregano and flat leaf parsley and spread them all on the tomatoes as evenly as I could. Then I baked them in the oven at 450F for about 30 mins.

After they had cooled a bit from the oven, I peeled the skins off (we ate them later because they are yummy, but I don't like them in the sauce) and scooped out all the good stuff into a deep bowl so I could use a stick blender to make the sauce. A regular blender would work fine too, or you could just mash it up if you like a chunkier sauce. We ended up using this sauce to cook with some stuffed peppers, which turned out great!

To make the stuffed bell peppers (which we had gotten in our CSA basket), I first made the stuffing and then cleaned and steamed the peppers to soften them, then stuffed them and baked them for about 20-30 mins til they were hot inside. Because I pre-cooked the stuffing mixture and the peppers, they took a lot less time to cook in the oven. I was inspired by this recipe, which I doctored up a bit: http://www.singforyoursupperblog.com/2009/08/20/delicious-stuffed-peppers/

For the stuffing, I pre-cooked some rice and then made a mixture of 1/2 lb of hamburger and 1/2 lb of pork sausage, which I cooked with some spices and onion and garlic and a touch of  tomato paste. Then I mixed in some rice (I think about a cup, but maybe more) and half the sauce and proceeded to stuff the peppers with the mixture. The rest of the sauce went into the bottom of a baking dish. I placed the peppers on top of the sauce, grated some cheddar cheese on top and baked it at 350F for about 20 mins. We served it over the rest of the rice and spooned some of the sauce on top, along with a nice big salad!