Easy Roasted Tomato Sauce

I love to put up my own sauce for he winter!  I have done so for the past 5 years, slowly learning the tips and tricks.

I now grow 8 Roma tomato plants exclusively for sauce -- that usually produces enough for me to make a few batches of home made sauce and put up enough to last my hubby and I through the winter.  The recipe I use is modified from an old family recipe that was passed on to me.  And although I love making that sauce, when the thermometer is reading anything more than 30 degrees C, it is just too hot to have a big old pot on the stove all day.

Last years heat wave gave me a record Roma crop -- but also meant that my Hubby put the kibosh on adding any more heat to my house than necessary.  With my regular sauce out of the question and tomatoes just waiting to be put up in one way or another I started looking for alternatives.  Eventually I stumbled on a suitable recipe somewhere in an old book.  I could easily roast these wonderful tomatoes making a delicious rich sauce without turning my house into a sauna!

I line a cookie sheet with parchment paper, cut the tomatoes in half (I use mostly romas, but I have thrown in other varieties if I want to get rid of them too -- see the cherry tomatoes mixed in below!).  Add a carrot cut into big chunks, and a few cloves of garlic (note - I am allergic to onions, so they are excluded from all my recipes, but you could easily add them in here!).  Sprinkle with salt, pepper, and any herb of choice (I used some dried basil this time), and drizzle with olive oil.  Throw it in an oven on low heat (I use around 250-300 degrees), and let it go.  I check on it about every 30 minutes to make sure nothing is burning and adjust the temperature accordingly.

Depending on how much moisture is in the tomatoes I usually bake for 60-90 minutes until they look nice and roasted, flipping when necessary so they don't burn.  When I pull them out of the oven, I dump everything into my blender to wizz up until its a consistency I like.  I let it cool, and throw it into an air-tight container and into the freezer it goes for a wonderful winter meal!

Since I am usually trying to limit the heat in my house, this is something I tend to do after 8pm once the sun is going down and its cooling off.  This sauce ends up being pretty thick, and also works well with eggplant parmesan or for anything else you want to pair with it!

This is also a great for those times when you have a smaller amount of tomatoes ready and don't want to put the effort in to making sauce the regular way.

Enjoy!