Homemade Marinara

Every time I go out to the garden I come back with about 10 tomatoes. I'm not complaining! We love tomatoes around here!

We canned some of our tomatoes.

I thought I would try making marinara sauce using some of the fresh tomatoes. It's so delicious and so easy! It does take a little time, but once you get started you can easily work on other things in between stirring the simmering sauce so it won't burn.

Start with just a few ingredients:

Chop the tomatoes (12-15) into chunks.

Brown 10-12 cloves of garlic in a tablespoon or so of olive oil.

Add tomatoes, 1 teaspoon salt and 1/4 cup olive oil to the pot. (The recipe I used called for 2 tablespoons of sugar. I tried it that way and thought it was too sweet. I tried it again with no sugar and actually like it much better that way.) Then let everything simmer.

And simmer! I've found that the right consistency comes after about 3 hours of simmering. I stirred the sauce about every 10-20 minutes, depending on what else I was doing.

Just before you serve the sauce, add a handful of chopped fresh basil.

I also have chopped basil from the garden frozen in chunks using an ice cube tray. This is great when it's raining or I'm too busy to go to the garden to get the fresh stuff. I'm planning to make more sauce during the winter, so these basil cubes will come in handy!

Thinking like an Italian (did you know I spent a school year in Italy?), it's best to mix your cooked pasta directly with the sauce so it will get coated and really come together.

I served this last night when we had friends over. That's a huge bowl, by the way! I used a whole box of penne pasta and the entire batch of marinara for 7 adults and 2 kids. Everybody really liked it.

I hope you do too!