Roasted Vegetable Tomato Sauce

So I get asked often enough for how I make my tomato sauce. A few weeks ago I decided to document the process and recipe so that I could share it with those that ask :) Enjoy and let me know if you try it!!

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Look I actually chicken scratched some measurements and directions for how I make my sauce. I normally am a "go with the gut, see how it looks, recipes are inspiration rather than law" type of cook so this was a big deal.

First things first, heat up a generous amount of olive oil on the bottom of a stock pot, chop up about 2 medium onions and 4 cloves of garlic and sautee them until they are a light brown on the edges.

I only used one onion but look how HUGE my onions were. That is a normal size coffee mug and that is the giant onion.

Once the garlic and onions have had some time to brown it is time to add the tomatoes. I had picked these from the garden about 15 minutes before I made the sauce to ensure that they were as fresh as possible. I used about 10 tomatoes of all different sizes. Don't ask me what kinds they were because I have no idea, just used whatever was ripe. If you hadn't noticed by now for everything in this "recipe" you can pretty much use how many you want/have.

Chop the tomatoes just so that they are not whole and put them in with the onions and garlic.

Now for the best part, the wine!! Most bottled sauce has alot of refined sugar in it so rather than adding sugar I use the sugar from the wine to sweeten the sauce. I have no idea exactly how much I used just whatever was left in the bottle.

And of course some wine to drink while doing all this cooking!

Once all that starts to bubble turn it down and and cover it. Now let it cook. I let mine cook for 2 hours, you could probably get decent results in a half hour but you could also let it cook all day.

Now time to make it Roasted Vegtable Tomatoe Sauce. I chopped up almost a full zucchini and yellow squash into small bite size pieces as you see in the picture below. I added these vegtables because curerntly there is a prethera of them and to add a little more veggie to the meal.

Place the chopped veggies on a cookie sheet, drizzle them with olive oil and sprinkle salt and pepper on them. The oven should be turned on to 400 degrees. I baked them for about 15 minutes flipped them and such and then baked them for another 15 minutes. Basically you want to bake them until they are a little roasted.

Now while the vegtables were roasting, I was blending the base of the sauce. I was lucky enough to find an immersion/hand blender at a thrift store a few years ago for $3 (score!!!). These work great but if you don't have one you can just pour the sauce in a blender.

Now here is the sauce all ready for the vegetables. Don't fear if it comes out a little more orange than red. Bottled sauces have added dye that makes them look more red. (Can you tell I am not Italian? I don't compare my sauce to my grandmas family recipe but to the bottled sauces that we grew up on.)

Take the roasted vegetables out of the oven and add them to your sauce. I then let it simmer for nearly another hour so that the vegetables could take on some of the taste of the sauce.

I am bummed but I never got pictures of the final result. It was late and I was just excited to get them into bags and the freezer. I put individual size portions into freezer bags and got nearly 10 bags! I also made a larger "lasagna bag" so that I could make a lasagna or something this winter.

Hope you enjoy the recipe!!

Please leave questions or comments below.