Spaghetti Sauce Recipe from Gwen

Gwen brings blueberries, blackberries as well as beautiful flower bouquets to the farmer's market. I took this photo just before the market was open, and all the blackberries were gone when I stopped by later that day. We talked about summer bounties, which brought a topic of my failed (or unfinished) tomato sauce the day before. I told Gwen that I didn't remove the seeds from the tomatoes before I boiled them down, and that Dan got home and found the sauce with seeds and told me that no respectable Italian woman would put tomato seeds in her tomato sauce! Well, first I am not an Italian, and I did remove the skins - I just didn't want to lose yummy tomato water and stuff around the seeds. She laughed at my story and said, Yeon, you got it all wrong. Here is what you do.

Basic tomato sauce

• Remove the core of tomatoes (you don't have to, she added) and cut tomatoes into quarters.

• Boil and simmer the tomatoes till they still have some liquid.
• Take your food mill out and run the sauce through to get the skins and seeds out.

Once you have this base, you can make spaghetti sauce.

• 5 cups of home-made basic tomato sauce
• 2 cans of tomato paste (each 8 oz, so you could use 1 16 oz can)
• 2 cans of tomato sauce (each 8 oz)
  
• garlic and onion (either fresh or dried)
• 2 - 3 Tbsp of dried oregano

Mix them, bring to boil then simmer till it reduces to a desired consistency. Gwen says that she doesn't bother with canning and just freezes this sauce. When you thaw, the sauce becomes a little watery and you can pour off the extra water that collects on top of the sauce.
Gwen's mom adds browned meat or pepper or other vegetable to the sauce before freezing it. Gwen says she likes to freeze just the sauce because she uses it for many other dishes in addition to making spaghetti. She also adds that this sauce is great over cooked spaghetti squash.

The same afternoon Dan and I went out and bought a food mill. I know. This extra harvest from our backyard garden is costing us extra money to come up with all the gadgets, such as mandoline and now food mill. But we love kitchen gadgets and they are investments for cold and hard winter time! Dan removed the seeds from the tomato sauce with the food mill. The sauce tasted surprisingly complex. It had the condensed flavor of tomatoes but it had more than that. Home-made tomato sauce captures the flavors and essence of summer garden. We will rejoice the glory of summer in wintertime, eating a bowl of spaghetti with home-made tomato sauce.