DIY Tomato Sauce

There's nothing I love more than reigniting old world skills that are slowly being lost like crocheting and roasting coffee. Yesterday a fellow old-world-skill-lover, Ashley, and I canned tomato sauce with mostly things we'd grown ourselves. Here's how we did it:

1. Harvest any tomato sauce appropriate vegetables and herbs from your garden. We found tomatos, onion, garlic, bell pepper and basil. We also procured honey from a local farm.


2. Chop up all ingredients. We used 5 lbs hothouse tomatoes, some onion and green bell pepper, 4 cloves garlic, a handful of basil and other Italian herbs.

3. Add all to a large pot along with sea salt, fresh cracked black pepper, lemon juice and honey. Maybe 1 tsp of each.

4. Let simmer with no lid until the volume has reduced to half. While it is simmering, continuously crush the larger pieces. Also, watch a Ricky Gervais movie.

5. At the same time, sanitize 4 small mason jars and in the same water, boil the lids.

5. Using a submersion blend, whirl everything to a thick sauce with no large pieces left behind.

6. Ladel the sauce into each mason jar with 1/2" head room. With a cloth to avoid burns, secure the hot lids on and gather ribbon to decorate.

7. We experimented with re-boiling half the jars in the water and leaving half out. Both sealed.

So that's that. Now we have eggplant cassarole for months to come!