Oven Roasted Tomato Sauce

I’m so excited because for Mother’s Day I got two Topsy Turvey Tomato plants. Have you seen the infomercial about it? It’s a hanging bag, you put the seeds at the bottom, fill it with soil, hang it from a hook, and the plants grow upside down! I can’t wait to see if it works!

Even if you don’t have a tomato plant in your garden this summer, you can make this oven roasted tomato sauce which is good for pasta, or as a pizza sauce. I got the recipe from a new magazine called “Cuisine at Home.”

This recipe makes about 5 cups of sauce.

You will need:

4 lbs. roma tomatoes, quartered
1 cup chopped onion
4 whole cloves of garlic
2 tsp. kosher salt
1 tsp. red pepper flakes
1 tsp. sugar
1/2 cup of olive oil (I used 1/4 cup)
1/2 cup fresh basil (I used dried)
*Not in original recipe, Italian seasoning about 2 tsp.
*Not in original recipe, black pepper, 1 tsp.

Preheat oven to 450 degrees. Combine tomatoes, onion, garlic cloves, salt, pepper flakes, and sugar in a large casserole dish. Toss tomato mixture with olive oil; roast 35-40 minutes until tomatoes have softened. Remove from oven and mash with a potato masher (or like me, puree with a hand blender, I don’t like chunky sauce!)