Tomato Sauce
I am not a tomato person. My whole life I have never liked raw tomatoes. Growing up, everyone else in my family liked tomatoes. For some reason I was different. I have tried to eat them and learn to like them. I tried fresh garden tomatoes because people said they were so much better than store bought tomatoes. But it didn’t work.
When I had kids, they ate tomatoes at my parents’ house and liked them. I was determined to let them eat tomatoes at home, even though I hated the smell of them and having tomato juice on my hands. I sacrificed for my kids, and gradually it got easier. Occasionally I would give them a taste, but I still couldn’t stand them.
Then last summer things changed. I planted a grape tomato plant because those would be easy for my kids to eat. The plant grew well and produced a ton of tomatoes. I was giving them away by the bagful. But somewhere along the way, I popped one in my mouth. It wasn’t too bad. I didn’t hate it. Slowly I ate them more and more, and eventually I did like them.
This summer I made the leap from sweet little grape tomatoes to actually eating chunks of garden fresh tomatoes in my salad. My husband couldn’t believe it! I can’t say I’ve turned into a tomato lover, but I’m thrilled with the progress I’ve made.
This year we had a grape tomato plant that didn’t do quite as well as last year’s plant, and I had another tomato plant that grew some medium sized tomatoes that I can’t remember the name of. Often they were not pretty looking with splits in the skin and some rather hard sections in the middle of them. For that reason, they were better used for chopping into salad or cooking with than for slicing.
All of that was introduction into this recipe. You see, I intended to make tomato soup. However, I don’t think I have eaten any tomato soup since I went gluten free eleven years ago, and I rarely had it before that. So I really wasn’t the best person to try and create a tomato soup recipe.
I decided to keep it simple and not use things like chicken broth or flour for thickening. What I made was very tasty, but it tasted and had the consistency of tomato sauce rather than tomato soup. I’m not talking about pasta sauce, but rather tomato sauce like you would buy in a can.
If you still have some lingering tomatoes on your plants or in your CSA box, you might want to consider making your own tomato sauce.
This picture was taken when I still thought I had made soup. I omitted the pepper for the sauce recipe.
