Tomato Sauce

How to make tomato sauce or it's time to get tomato based sauce back on your radar.

First, the ingredients.

Pictured above are the tomatoes, the basil, and the oregano from left to right. I thought it would be fun to make an all garden fresh tomato sauce.

Step 2, peel the tomatoes. To peel the tomatoes cut the tomatoes in half or score the bottoms. Place them in boiling water until the skins loosen from the flesh. Then drop them in ice water and move them to a separate bowl to dry. This should loosen the skin and allow them to be peeled more easily.

Step 3, place the peeled tomatoes in a pot or dutch oven. Add herbs, chopped and simmer for an hour or more. Stir and break up the tomatoes to your desired consistency. If you want smooth sauce, run the tomatoes through a food processor or blender.

And that's all there is to it, although you should add salt to taste.

Compost

A neighbor was discarding a compost bin earlier in the summer. I thanked my lucky stars and put it to use. Here she is:

We keep a 5 gallon food grade bucket in the garage to fill throughout the day and then make sure to add it to the compost before it gets ripe.

Just add any organic plant matter. Since this is a photo blog, here's a picture of some clementine peels.

And the daily coffee grounds. Go ahead and add the whole thing, filter and all.

I haven't been worrying and fretting over the compost, as my goal is too have some for use next spring. You need about equal parts kitchen matter "green" to yard waste "brown," I've read. And you need to keep things hot and aerated. 

Updates to follow as the seasons change and nature takes its course.

Got eggplant?

What do you do when your Japanophile-friend from the lab has a bunch of asian eggplant and offers you some? Make pizza of course. This was inspired by a middle-eastern dish I had and hope to make some day, but for now we have eggplant Parmesan pizza!

Notice how the asian eggplant are small and narrower than the ones we are used to.

Slice them up and get ready to roast in the oven. Not too hot! Maybe 300 deg.

After a while they look like this. Nice and soft.

Puree in a food processor.

Add garlic, whole milk, and parmesan cheese into a pot you just used to cook sausage in. The grease will lube up the pan and the cheese will help to thicken up this sauce.

Spread on pizza dough! Looks good.

Final product! Tip: if you want to enjoy a storebought frozen pizza caliber crust, use about 25% corn meal in the dough and use it immediately after rising. Not good. We like fermented dough man. Fermented dough is key.

Until next 'za.