Cooking with my roma tomatoes

A few days ago, Q and I visited our garden in Fort Collins. This may have been our last time, so we wanted to see what was available. We came back with carrots, zucchini, cucumbers and lots more tomatoes! We shared them with the church folk here, and still had quite a bit left. This was my chance to create and taste the romas that I planted from seed this spring. 

Aren't they just beautiful? I ended up washing almost five dozen of these little guys. I found a recipe for spaghetti sauce and decided to venture into the big task of peeling, seeding, and cooking these tomatoes.

After I washed them, I dipped them into boiling water, then cool water before peeling them. After cutting them in half,  I used a metal 1/4 teaspoon (as well as my finger) to take out the core and seeds. Before cooking up my sauce this entire process took me over an hour!

The recipe I found was from Taste of Home. It takes some prep time plus an hour and a half for it to simmer. So all in all, I spent well over three hours cooking this delicious meal for Q, but it was awesome! Since we didn't get to celebrate his birthday last Friday, we did it today.

I'm so glad that I got to use and taste the tomatoes from our garden. Maybe next year we'll have time to can some since we won't be in the midst of moving!

Okay, here's the recipe...Enjoy! I added ground beef to the sauce and used regular spaghetti for this, but you could use ground turkey and whole wheat pasta to make it even more healthy.

Basil Spaghetti Sauce

1 cup chopped onion

8 garlic cloves, minced

1/4 cup canola oil

8 cups coarsely chopped peeled tomatoes (about 5 pounds)

1/3 cup minced fresh basil or 2 tablespoons dried basil

1/4 cup minced fresh parsley

1 1/2 teaspoons salt

1/2 teaspoons pepper

1/2 teaspoon sugar

In a large saucepan or Dutch oven over medium heat, saute onion and garlic in oil until tender. Add tomatoes, basil, parsley, salt, pepper and sugar; bring to a boil. Reduce heat; cover and simmer for 1 and 1/2 hours. Yield: about 8 servings.

Want to know what we had for Q's special birthday dessert? Stay tuned....