Homemade Tomato Sauce

There are basically three ways of making tomato sauce:

Method I: Skin, peel and dice the tomatoes by hand
Method II: Blanch the tomatoes in hot water to remove their skin then cut them up
Method III: Use a food mill or food grinder to crush the tomatoes

You can use any type of tomato you want to. Roma tomatoes are traditional and quite tasty! They are also the easiest to peel, as they have a smooth bulb like shape. Unfortunately, they can also be rather expensive! They are cheapest in the summer, so buy a bunch at your local farmers market in the summer and make some sauce!

I have made sauce all three ways now. If you have a food mill or food grinder, Method III really is the easiest way. You can make a lot of sauce this way!  But such devices are expensive and take up room!

Method I is the traditional (and in my opinion best)  method, but it is very time consuming. Also, if you don't have Roma tomatoes, then it gets difficult to peel them (some tomatoes have bumps, crevices and odd shapes that don't lend themselves to easy peeling!)

This recipe calls for Method II-blanching the tomatoes to remove their skin and then cooking them. I find it a pretty even compromise between taste, time and convenience. This is a relatively painless method, but you don't get much sauce--usually enough for 2 people for 2 days. But it serves its purpose!

This time, I shortened the recipe by making less. It worked out wonderful! The key is not to seed the tomatoes, as that takes way too long and you loose most of the soft tomato flesh.

The tomatoes and herbs were fresh from my garden which made it very delicious!


Ingredients
3 large tomatoes, fresh (you can use more if you have any)
2 large tomatoes, fresh (you can use more if you have any)
2 bell peppers, preferably red, cut in half, deseeded and destemed
Fresh tomato paste
3 cloves of garlic, whole, skin on
1/2 red or yellow onion, diced
Pancetta, or ground beef, lamb or bacon (optional)
Rich Dark Chicken Stock or vegetable stock
Red Wine
1 or 2 bay leaves
A big bunch of fresh herbs (oregano, lemon thyme, basil, parsley and rosemary)





Directions
Boil a big pot of water.

Take 3 tomatoes and wash. Make four small, shallow incisions with a sharp paring knife from the top of each tomato to the bottom, cutting thinly through the skin.

Place the tomatoes in the boiling water. Let the tomatoes cook for 1-2 minutes. Remove with a slotted spoon. If you dont have a slotted spoon you can jab a fork into the tomato on the stem side and submerge in the boiling water.

Immediately run under cold water and the skins should peel off fairly effortlessly. Set aside.


Heat up some olive oil in a cast iron pot. Add the pancetta, bacon or other meat. Cook for a few minutes, until their fat is released and the meat is cooked.










Add the onions and stir fry for a few minutes, until the onion loose their raw taste.

Chop up the 3 skinned tomatoes and add them to your pot. Be sure to add all the juices. Stir fry for a few minutes.

Add a little chicken stock and red wine and turn off the heat.






Take a cookie sheet and grease with olive oil. Add the red bell peppers, 2 tomatoes, and 3 garlic cloves.  Pour some more olive oil on all the vegetables. Set the rack in your oven just below the broiler. Set the broiler in your oven to high and broil for several minutes, until the tomatoes and bell peppers are charred. Turn and repeat. Remove from oven and let sit for a few minutes.

Once the bell peppers have cooled slightly, add them to a food processor. Add the tomatoes. Remove the garlic from their skin (they should just pop off) and add to the food processor. Blend all the ingredients until smooth. You should see little black flakes in the sauce from the charring of the bell peppers.

Add the blended tomatoes and bell peppers back to your pot. Reduce the heat to low and simmer. Add your herbs and continue to cook.

At this point, you can adjust with adding more stock or wine. I also add a little bit of tomato paste to thicken up the sauce.







If you have any fresh herbs, add them to the sauce. I had fresh basil, rosemary, lemon thyme, regular thyme, sage and parsley growing in my back yard garden, so I added all of them to the mix!

Pesto

I love pesto. Pour some over pasta for a quick and delicious meal. Add it as a topping on sliced tomatoes. I like to make a Pesto Pizza.

Ingredients
1 garlic clove, peeled
Salt
1/4 cup pine nuts, lightly toasted
1 bunch Basil, about 1 lightly packed cup
1/4 cup Parmesan cheese
1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil

Toast the pine nuts in a iron skillet.













In a mortar and pestle, pound the garlic and salt into a paste.
Add pine nuts and continue to pound.
Transfer the garlic, salt and pine nuts to a small glass container in which you will store your pesto.





























Pick the leaves from the basil and add to the mortar. Pound the basil into a paste. Return the pounded pine nuts to the mortar. Pound the leaves and pine nut mixture together. Transfer everything back to your glass container and add olive oil.

Tofu Lasagna

In my books, Lasagna, particularly, vegan lasagna, always had two major strikes against it. When I was growing up,  we used to have Lasagna all the time and I hated it.  It was the ricotta cheese. Ordinarily, I am a big fan of cheese, any kind of cheese. But I don't like ricotta.

This recipe replaces the ricotta with tofu, which I must admit doesn't sound very appetizing, but it is actually quite delicious and relatively simple to prepare! This recipe was adopted from Moosewood Restaurant New Classics. And here in comes the second strike against this recipe--I used to hate this book as well. From my freshman to junior year in college, I lived in a vegan co-op, where we cooked our own food. Most of the food we cooked was vegan, or rather, normal food adopted to a Vegan diet. All in all, it was a fairly miserable gastronomical experience. Bad thing too, because it really make me loathe even looking at the Moosewood cookbook.

Flash forward 16 years....(my god has it been that long?) and I am marrying a dietitian with a penchant for vegetarian food. Ah, the things we do for love...

This dish can be made relatively quickly with little prep time. There is no need to boil the lasagna noodles before placing them down in your baking sheet. You can just lay down uncooked lasagna noodles. By adding water, vegetable stock or chicken stock to your tomato sauce, you increase the water content-this will help cook the lasagna noodles while they are baking.


Ingredients
Tomato sauce (vegetarian or non vegetarian)

12 oz tofu (1 package), roughly cut into chunks
1 cup mozzarella cheese (shredded or grated)
Oregano
Dried Basil

Lasagna noodles (about 1 lbs)


Drain the tofu and cut into chunks. Add to a food processor. Add mozzarella cheese, Oregano, Basil and any other spices you want. Blend into a fine puree. There should not be any lumps at all in the tofu puree. Set aside.

Preheat oven to 350.































Begin by pouring a thin layer of sauce into a 9"x 13" pan and spread it out till it coats evenly, albeit thinly.














Begin laying down the lasagna noodles. I like to lay the noodles next to each other. Break off the noodles if they are too big for the pan. Use the broken pieces to fill in the nooks and crannies that might appear.














With a spatula, spread a thing layer of the tofu mixture on top of the noodles, covering all of the noodles.































Sprinkle a layer of cheese onto of the tofu.


Continue layering in this order: Sauce, Lasagna Noodle, Tofu, cheese....Sauce, Lasagna Noodle, Tofu, cheese.

I usually do 2 layers of Sauce, Lasagna Noodle, Tofu, cheese, and then my pan is full. You want your pan to be pretty much full with your layers of sauce, lasagna noodles, tofu and cheese.













When you think you are finished, make sure the final layer that is on top is a nice think layer of cheese. This layering method will help the lasagna to fuse together and not fall apart when you cut into it.














Cover the dish tightly with aluminum foil and put it into the oven. Try and tent the aluminum foil so it actually doesn't touch the sauce. Since your final layer is cheese, this shouldn't be too much of a problem. But bad things happen when tomato sauce come in contact with aluminum foil.












Bake for 1 hour at 350.

Allow the Lasagna to cool for 10 minutes before serving.

Delicious!

Pasta Bolognese

I was watching Jamie Oliver one night and he was cooking this recipe. It looked absolutely fantastic so I decided to make it.

I copied the recipe exactly, no additions or omissions, and it turned out oh so good! You can see his recipe here.

I used some brisket which I got at Marin Sun Farms. I had never cooked with brisket before, but the salesman at Marin Sun Farms convinced me that it would be delicious in this dish. He was right!

This is a great pasta sauce, or use it as a basis for lasagna.




Ingredients
2 strips of bacon or pancetta
2 medium onions
2 cloves garlic
2 carrots
2 sticks of celery
olive oil
2 heaping teaspoons dried oregano
1/2 lbs beef brisket
2 cans of chopped tomatoes
Salt and Pepper
Fresh Basil
Parmesan Cheese
Spaghetti, Penne, tagliatelle or other pasta


Finely slice the bacon or pancetta in a large stock pot.

Peel and finely chop the onions, garlic, carrots and celery. I pulsed mine in a food processor, which was quick and dirty!

Heat some olive oil to a large stock pot and add the bacon or pancetta and oregano. Stirfry for a few minutes until the pancetta or bacon is cooked.

Add the vegetables to the pan and stir fry for 7 minutes, or until softened.

Stir in the brisket or meat and brown, breaking it up with you spoon as you cook it.





Add the canned tomatoes with their juices.

Fill one of the empty cans of tomatoes with water and add it to the pot.

Give it a good pinch of salt and pepper.

Add a swig of red wine.

Add chopped basil and continue to stir. Bring to a boil and reduce the heat to a simmer. Cover with the lid slightly askew, stirring every now and then.

Remove the lid and continue to cook for 30 minutes, stirring occasionally. If the sauce looks like it is drying out, add a little water.







































Remove from heat after 30 minutes. Grate the Parmesan cheese and add half into the pot.

Serve immediately or let cool and freeze.

Just before serving, add remainder of the grated Parmesan cheese.