I am a member of Slow Food, which tries to bring people back to the table with the freshest foods, cooking with real ingredients, the more it comes from the earth, the better! Recently I joined that Group on Linked-In and a fellow member Meredith Greene posted a great recipe using her bumper crop of fresh tomatoes she grew in her back yard. It’s a great idea in general, but especially when you have so many tomatoes you don’t know what to do with them.
With her permission, this is her recipe for Slow Food 15 minute pasta sauce, which is so easy anyone can make this!
We’ve been harvesting scores of tomatoes each day from our twelve ‘bushes’ in our backyard organic garden. This morning I got up early and tried out a cooking method for tomato ‘sauce’ that I found online: 15 minutes of cook-time.
It sounded too good to be true, but I thoroughly loathe standing for hours (literally) by my stove stirring and wasting so much heat energy making sauce the old fashioned way.
The new method was fairly straightforward:
Pre-heat oven to 465 degrees F; cut the fresh tomatoes in 1/3″-1/2″ slices and lay them in a single layer on two large cookie sheets (cooking two sheets at once saves energy and makes enough sauce for two meals for four folks, or one dinner for a table of 6.) Roughly chop or slice 1 large yellow onion and scatter it in between the tomatoes slices; peel 8 garlic cloves and also stick them in among the tomatoes slices; drizzle EVOO liberally over, sprinkle salt and pepper to taste. Put both sheet in oven on different levels and bake for 15 minutes (even better results if on convection mode). I also saw another variation for putting in some fresh red bell pepper among the onions but I have not tried this, yet.
Remove sheets from oven; let cool slightly; tomatoes will look juicy, broken down and the onions a bit caramelized. Using your blender in turns, pour in tomato mixture about 2/3 of the way, pour in about 1/4-1/2 cup red wine (we used Twin Fin Cabernet Sauvignon–an inexpensive California wine with a deep, almost chocolaty flavor that pairs remarkably well with pasta).
Blend to desired consistency (less for a more lumpy sauce) and add salt, more EVOO or seasoning as you wish (we used a few sprigs of fresh rosemary) and a few green olives. Pour into a resealable container; it can be eaten right away but it is best if left in the refrigerator to ‘season’ for a few hours. We served with a simple green salad and a bit of grated Pecorino.
The best part: due to the limited cooking time, the tomatoes still retained that fresh-from-the vine unique quality. This method yielded the freshest, most flavorful pasta sauce I’ve ever tasted, without exception.
Thanks Meredith for letting me share this with my readers!
Does anyone have a lot of tomatoes growing in their gardens yet?? If so, what do you do/make with all of them?
Also, a fellow blogger John, who has lost 100 pounds since January, is going to try to participate in 40 events by his 40th birthday! Stride Gum is having a contest and if you vote for John, he could win $10,000.00!!! The voting starts today, so please vote daily until August 9th!! Click HERE to vote!
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And thanks so much for everyone’s support and suggestions for me giving up diet soda! I’ve survived 24 hours so far! And, I did P90X last night for 50 minutes! (the first disc) Wahoo!!
Recipe sounds amazing!! And huge congrats on giving up diet soda and doing P90X!! Wooo Hoooo! AttaGirl!!
This sauce sounds wonderful!
Hi Jenn! Thanks for the voting and posting on your blog! It’s early but with everyone’s help I’ve been in the top 5 all day! Just 19 days to go
🙂