Homemade Red Sauce

A here, one of my new favorite passions is canning. I love preserving food and wasting nothing! Vegetables and fruits are so expensive at the grocery store that (to be totally honest) I wouldn't buy them on a regular. One of my very best friends introduced to this amazing co-op called Bountiful Baskets. I have been religious about ordering my fruits and veggies from them every Monday. They have these amazing deals so when something good comes along I try to take advantage...that brings me to this post. Today I made my very own marinara sauce. S told me about the recipe, you can find the that here. I increased the original recipe to use 15 pounds of tomatoes. Prepare yourself for lots of pictures!!

Preheat oven to 400

 Start with garlic...

Cut it in the middle, place halves on some foil and drizzle with olive oil

Fold the foil around the garlic and place on a cookie sheet.

Now take your tomatoes. I used Roma...I'm not sure if these are the ideal tomato but it's what I used and I think it turned out just fine :)

Quarter your tomatoes and place them on the cookie sheet.  Then place them in the oven for 30 minutes. You should see the skin coming off the tomatoes and at this point it should be super easy to peel it off. I had a lot of tomatoes in there so I left them in the oven for 55 minutes.

When the tomatoes are done roasting they will look something like this...

This is where the process really began for me!! You need to skin the tomatoes and seed them. It was easiest  for me to throw the skins in my skin, strain the seeds in the colander (on the left) and put the tomato in the pot (on the right)

This is what I had after the tomatoes were skinned and seeded. I  put all the juices that where on the cookie sheet and drained from the seeds in the pot as well.

Chop some onion and carrot...(I used my food processor)

Saute the onion and carrot in olive oil until the carrot is tender and the onion is translucent

While that is sauteing, take the garlic out of the foil packets and squeeze the heads out. 

Add the tomatoes and garlic to the onion and carrot.

This recipe calls for WHEAT beer...this is the flavor I used :) 

Now add the beer to the tomato mixture :) I forgot to take a picture but you will also add salt, pepper and basil. Bring it up to a simmer and let it cook until your desired thickness. If you want you can leave it chunky or blend it. I choose to blend it simply because I didn't chop the tomatoes earlier and the garlic was in too big of pieces for me. Had I chopped the tomatoes into chunks and minced the garlic I probably wouldn't have blended the sauce. 

Now the fun begins. I had two pots going at this point. The gray for the sauce and the black for the canning process. The black one has water simmering. While the sauce was thickening I was washing my canning jars. I washed them first because my dish washer was running while I was making everything and I only wanted to have to run a short cycle to keep the jars warm.

 I ended up using 16 pint jars...the picture is only of 12. 

Here is the end result! I am planning on doing some more canning tomorrow so I will post pictures of the entire canning process then with more detail about what to do and everything!

Hope you enjoy the sauce :) looks like we have lots of pasta and pizza to make in our future :)