Basic tomato sauce

Tomato sauce is a staple in our house.  It is a reliable tastey 'dip' for toddlers, as well as a perfect fast meal with a bit of pasta.  We also use it as pizza sauce, and as a base to add things to and make barbecue sauce or even a mild salsa.  We like to make big batches and store a lot of it in jars in the freezer, then whenever our jar in the refrigerator gets low, we bring out a new one to defrost.

The key to making a sauce that is so versatile, though, is to keep it simple.  No adding oregano or basil or other spices, which would be great as a pasta sauce, but if you use it on beans and eggs with cilantro might not taste entirely right.

Simple pasta sauce recipe:

Six 28 oz cans of whole tomatoes
teaspoon of salt
splash of olive oil
5-6 garlic cloves, diced

Open your cans of tomatoes and add them (two at a time for us) to a food processor or blender to puree them, and add the salt.  (or we just recently bought an immersion blender, so now we put them in a big pot and puree them there!).  Take the biggest pot you've got, heat it up on medium heat, then add the olive oil, maybe a tablespoon for the whole batch.  After it's hot and sizzling a little, add the diced garlic cloves.  Sautee the garlic for maybe a minute, then add all your pureed tomato and stir it around.  Then keep heating the sauce until it's as thick as you want it.  For instance, we like our pizza sauce pretty thick, but our pasta sauce more thin.  So we will make it more on the thin side, knowing we might have to add some tomato paste to it on pizza night.  The higher you turn the heat, the faster it will thicken up, but the more often you need to stir it to keep it from burning.  A lower heat requires less stirring, and is fine for a long day that you'll be hanging out at home, anyway!

The face of a pasta lover