Uncrafty- and a 20 minute garden tomato sauce.

I have been decidedly uncrafty this week. I haven't done a single project but I've been cooking up a storm. There seems to be a direct connection between crafting and the quality of meals we eat. The more I craft the less I pay attention to dinner, the less craftiness the better the meals are. Is that true for everyone I wonder?

On a related note the tomatoes continue to bury us. It's only three plants but they are out of control.

I made stuffed tomatoes (and peppers) this week (both were yummy) and decided to try making a quick pasta sauce with leftover tomato insides. To my surprise the sauce turned out really great- I had no idea it would be as easy as it was! I made and froze enough sauce for one pasta meal literally with the vegetable scraps I had from the meal I was making. Here's what I did:

Ingredients

• The insides of 6-8 large tomatoes (I used beefsteak). I was making stuffed tomatoes so I had "cleaned out" each tomato to form a bowl that would hold my rice stuffing. I was left with the juice, seeds and fleshy part of the tomato. I kept the seeds in, but if you want them out you can strain the juice to remove them. Chop any large chunks into pieces.

• The tops from two peppers. I removed the stem and chopped the pepper into small slices.

• A quarter of a small onion sliced

• About an inch of carrot sliced (this was the part towards the top that gets hard to handle when your grating a carrot)

• Two cloves of garlic chopped

• Pinch of sugar

• 8 basil leaves chopped

• Pinch of fresh thyme and a few chopped oregano leaves

• Salt and pepper to taste

Cooking Instructions

Throw all the vegetables and herbs into a sauce pan and simmer until vegetables start to soften. Add a pinch of sugar- to taste (I used less than a half teaspoon, the carrot really seemed to sweeten this up enough on it's own) and cook for another few minutes.

Once I was happy with the taste and the veggies were soft I used a stick blender to puree the sauce (you could also let this cool and use a food processor). I blended it until it was mostly smooth but still had a few small chunks of herbs and veggies. But you can blend it however smooth you want it.

Again, I left the seeds in the sauce and wanted to be sure not to blend those up (they can be bitter) but if you want a totally smooth sauce, remove the seeds beforehand and puree it very fine.

This made enough to have a pasta meal for two and was easly simmering away while I made the meal we were having that night with little attention needed. Plus I'm happy all those tomato insides got used instead of tossed into the compost bin.

Here are a few more pictures from the garden. It looked so pretty this morning with the sun just beginning to hit it.

Have a great day!