Foodie Friday: All About Tomatoes!

Foodie Friday: All About Tomatoes!

Welcome to Foodie Fridays!

Welcome to another FOODIE FRIDAY! I’m a total foodie fanatic. I think I spend more time watching cooking shows on TV than I do writing. πŸ™‚ I also LOVE cooking. (My fantasy food TV show would be called “ARE YOO HUNGRY?” LOL!)

This week’s blog is all about our garden. We had bought a house a few years ago. The backyard had a sandbox for the previous owner’s children and dogs. We ended up getting rid of the sand and turning it into a garden…

 

From sandbox to bountiful garden!

We grew so many tomatoes, I swear we could have set up a small stand at a local farmers’ market and made money off these tomatoes. LOL! I LOVED growing our own tomatoes. You don’t realize how “chemical” they taste at your regular supermarket because they’re often forced to ripen at an artificial rate due to mass distribution/transportation. Eating tomatoes from our garden was an amazing experience – they actually tasted like REAL tomatoes. The difference was like night and day between our garden tomatoes and the ones we bought at our local supermarket.

One summer, we decided to make homemade marinara sauce from our overly abundant garden.

(Keep reading after the jump to see how we made homemade marinara sauce from scratch!)

HOMEMADE MARINARA SAUCE

We had to harvest all our tomatoes before the vines died. We didn’t know what to do with this bucket of tomatoes, so I made some home-made marinara sauce.

I made two types – one where I crushed the tomatoes and cooked them with olive oil, garlic, basil and thyme and salt and pepper for an hour.

We also fire roasted the others and will make a fire-roasted marinara sauce later this week. However, we did not have a food mill at the time, so I wasn’t successful at removing the skins and seeds, but it still tasted delicious! I get why you don’t want seeds, tho, cuz they crunch a bit, but it was still tasty.Β I recommend making homemade marinara sauce instead of buying it in the bottle! I hope to can some marinara sauce for use later, too. Hooray for recession-style recipes! πŸ™‚

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Our tomato harvest bounty from our backyard garden! What to do with all these tomatoes? I know! Let’s make homemade marinara sauce!

 

Our tomato bounty from our garden!

I quartered the tomatoes and put ’em in the food processor. Did not have a food mill, so was stuck with the skins and seeds. Cooked ’em in garlic-infused olive oil, basil and oregano, salt and pepper for about an hour.

 

Basic ingredients for marinara sauce!

 

Here I am adding the basil and oregano…

 

Tomatoes have been through the food mill and are now simmering!

 

Stirred the mixture up and let it simmer for an hour.

 

Stir the tomatoes with lots of herbs!

 

Enjoyed over linguine with some parmesan cheese! For lunch leftovers, I re-heated the sauce with some Farmer John sausage, also yummy! (Recession styled food at cheap prices!)

 

Yummy marinara spaghetti!

 

We also fire roasted the other batch of tomatoes and plan to make a roasted tomato marinara sauce this week!

 

For a special treat, fire roast your tomatoes for a roasted marinara flavor!

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Does anyone else have a garden? If so, what food have you made with your bounty? I’d love to Β hear about your gardening adventures! Please comment below! If you are a first-time visitor, follow the WordPress prompts!

Until the next blog, Happy Eating! (And Writing! πŸ™‚ WRITE LIKE YOU MEAN IT! πŸ™‚ (Or, “EAT LIKE YOU MEAN IT!”)

 

8 Responses

  1. Lynett says:

    We have been enjoying Caprese salad & leftovers, if there are any, tossed with pasta & garbanzos or roasted chicken for a nice light meal. We have a ton of lavender & I’m looking forward to making some syrup & glaze for pound cake with it. In the next couple of weeks, we’ll be canning tomatoes or putting up sauce or something cuz it’s about to go crazy out there. Thanks for the fire-roasted idea. Giada De Laurentis has a good non-cooking recipe for tomato sauce too, so yummy!

    • paulayoo says:

      I LOVE CAPRESE SALAD! I like chickpeas too. I love Giada too and lavendar is very “hip” these days in the foodie world. Very cool comment, thanks!

  2. TeresaR says:

    Boy, if there’s one thing we do have, it’s a garden (my regular blog is about our homesteading adventures). Hubby gardens in about a half acre of our property, if you include the orchard and various fruit trees spread about. πŸ™‚

    We can our tomatoes. Last year, we canned about 78 quarts. It’s exhausting work though. Luckily, we have slave labor, a.k.a. our kids. Heh!

    It’s good to know that your sauce turned out so great even with seeds and skin! We have some frozen tomatoes that I can try making your marinara sauce with. I don’t recommend freezing tomatoes, but we had a family emergency last year and ran out of time for canning.

    • paulayoo says:

      WOW, I didn’t realize that about your regular blog. Will bookmark now! Thanks for the tip! So lucky with fruit trees! πŸ™‚ 78 quarts?! You are my HERO! The seeds and skins were a pain but we cooked it for so long and it was a small batch and so it didn’t matter. We then bought a food mill – wow what a difference!

      • TeresaR says:

        Sadly enough, some of my IRL and blogging friends do so much more homestead-y stuff, it makes me look like a slacker. :}

        BTW, am reading Good Enough right now…it is so hilarious!! Love it!

        • paulayoo says:

          LOL! You are not a slacker! πŸ™‚ And tnx for the kind GE words, greatly appreciated! πŸ™‚

  3. My wife won’t even think of eating tomatoes until the summertime in these parts (Philadelphia suburbs) and the freshest of the fresh arrive in our local markets. We have had a good run of growing them ourselves at times but it appears local wildlife has a taste for fresh tomatoes as well. In our current domicile, there are not enough moats and drawbridges to keep back the horde so we patiently wait another couple of weeks and the market will be full of ’em. Good Eats to all, Bruce.

    • paulayoo says:

      Good Eats! πŸ™‚ Love that show. And yes, eating fresh tomatoes from our garden made me realize how chemical the supermarket ones taste.

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