Sauce Day!

Yesterday was our first big tomato-harvesting and sauce-making jubilee. Our climate is mild enough that we'll produce tomatoes until the first frost, so there will probably be more crops and sauces to come. We freeze it and put away enough to last throughout the year!

We planted four tomatoes this season: Roma, San Marzano, Sweet 100 cherries, and Better Boy, which was new to us this year. In addition, we have a TON of basil that will both go into this sauce and be made into pesto which, again, we'll freeze and use well into next year. 

I know few things as satisfying and gratifying as picking something from your garden in the morning, cooking it, and serving it for dinner that night. 

Karen and Riley harvesting our crop. Riley LOVES cherry tomatoes; any that hit the ground are hers. I made this U-shaped raised bed, which doesn't have a ton of square footage but is efficient and sufficient for us. You can see a bit of our basil patch peeking out behind Karen.

Today's yield, which will be clean, sliced, and tossed into a pot.

Eleven cloves of garlic ready to be diced. In our family, we call that "a good start."

Everybody in the pool! We'll cook it down for a few hours now. We don't bother peeling the tomatoes (hundreds of cherry tomatoes!), but will use an immersion blender to smooth it all out later.

Added at 1 p.m.: Added some basil and hit it with the immersion blender. Then added spices, Parmesan cheese, onion, bay leaves (plucked from trees in a nearby creek). Sometimes we leave it vegetarian, but this batch has ground beef, browned in another pan (with the onion) and added. Now we just give it a few hours to percolate and thicken. Beautiful color!

Added at 6:30 p.m.: Farm to Table in about seven hours! Fresh sauce on a nest of wide fettuccini, with Romano beans from the farmer's market and a nibble of garlic bread. It was good. Very good.

Leftover sauce headed to the freezer. Depending on how many we're feeding, each container is good for one meal or more. We'll probably make another batch as big or bigger in a few weeks.