Easy tomato sauce

Spent a pleasant hour at the allotment yesterday, transplanted Italian kale Cavolo Nero, Chinese greens and a mixed variety of lettuce including my special favourite Drunken Woman. Who can resist with a name like that. Continued my battle with nut grass and dug out a fair pile of the stuff.

On the way home I managed to buy a bag of cooking tomatoes for $1 a kilo from my local fruitier. He has such a high standard that   once anything is past it’s absolute best he likes to move it on. According to Jamie Oliver the riper tomato has more flavour for cooking anyway, and I believe him!  So today I am cooking a batch of quick and easy tomato sauce using my home-grown Greek basil and the garlic from last season’s crop.

A simple recipe. See below, just these few ingredients.

Chop two medium onions and simmer in a pan for a few minutes with a quarter of a cup of olive oil, the idea is not to brown the onions, just go transparent.  Then add one kilo of tomatoes (quartered), 3 or 4 cloves of garlic depending on your taste, and a handful of basil. Simmer gently for 15 minutes or until everything has broken down. Add salt and freshly grated black pepper to taste. See photo below.

I then put the sauce through my mouli using the medium disk to hold back the tomato skin and seeds. The pulp left in the mouli goes onto the compost heap at the allotment.

So out of the kilo of tomatoes I ended up with five small jars of delicious fresh tomato sauce with no preservatives or nasties.  I will use one jar immediately so it’s sitting in the fridge. The others have gone into the freezer. I made sure there is plenty of headroom in the jars as I expect the contents will expand with freezing. NOTE: This sauce is not meant to go into your pantry as a ‘preserve’ as it has not been through a water bath to sterilise.

I produced this sauce for just a few dollars, and the ‘shop stuff’ doesn’t compare when it comes to taste.  (Is it bad manners to eat the last spoonful out of the pan whilst standing up in the kitchen?)