Just Tomatoes Sauce for Freezing

I've been remiss in posting, but not in cooking! I've been up to all kinds of shenanigans in the kitchen, including impromptu bagel French toast Sunday that I should have documented for posterity, but didn't.

So good.

Anyway. For those of you who haven't noticed, it's August (already!). What does August mean? Tomatoes! Technically the tail-end of the tomato season, especially considering the crazy heat we've been having in Oklahoma. But that just means there are lots and lots of delicious, juicy, but maybe not completely perfect tomatoes available at the Farmer's Market (and perhaps in a backyard near you)!

I love tomatoes. I tend to buy pounds and pounds of them this time of year--pounds and pounds that I can't possibly eat before they dissolve into icky tomato mush.

So I turn them into a basic tomato sauce for freezing. Fast, simple, no messing around with canning and acidity levels and botulism. I have plenty of room in my freezer for a few flat baggies of sauce. Because the sauce is unseasoned, it can be used in all kinds of recipes later--to add a tomatoey punch to taco meat, summer flavor to tomato soup, or, of course, as the base for all kinds of pasta sauces.

If canning intimidates you but you want to store up some of that summer-fresh produce for winter, do this. Trust me.

Just Tomatoes Sauce for Freezing
Adapted from this recipe at The Girl's Guide to Guns and Butter.
And by adapted, I actually mean that mine's just a smaller batch, I think.

Start with some tomatoes. It doesn't really matter how many you have; this will work fine with two pounds or ten, so long as you have an appropriately-sized pot.

Core the tomatoes and chop them into pieces. Large bite-sized pieces are about right; this might be quarters or eighths or halves, depending on how big your tomatoes are. Feel free to toss grape tomatoes in whole.

De-seed the tomatoes if you want, though I like them left in. Don't worry about the peels, as those will be shredded when you blend them anyway.

Chopped tomatoes.

Put the tomatoes in a pot.

Potted tomatoes.

Sprinkle them with salt to taste (I tend to undersalt here since I use this sauce in such a variety of end dishes).

Add just a splash or two of water. You want enough to help the cooking get started, not dilute the flavor.

Not much water at all.

Bring to a simmer and cook, uncovered, 10 to 35 minutes. Yes, that's a wide time range, but remember I gave you a wide poundage range! Two pounds of tomatoes don't take long; ten pounds will take longer. The key is to get your tomatoes to look like this (feel free to beat them up with a potato masher if you'd like):

About halfway done.

And finally this:

Done.

The tomatoes should break down and get juicy (I told you you didn't need to add much water), but shouldn't cook down or get thick.



Cooked tomatoes.

Then it's time to blend! You have two options, depending on your available equipment: immersion blender or regular blender. Or, I guess, food processor.

To use a regular blender or food processor, pour your cooked and somewhat cooled tomatoes into said appliance and blend until smooth.

If you have an immersion blender (and you should, if you like sauces and soups and all other kinds of things), you can blend right in the pot. Or you can pour the cooked tomatoes into a bowl that's better shaped for pouring; this will make it easier to pour your sauce into plastic bags for freezing.

Blending.

Blended.

The sauce should be nice and smooth once blended.

Once the sauce is fully cooled, you're ready to bag and freeze it. You'll need freezer bags, not just storage bags. These use a thicker plastic and a better seal to keep everything fresh and tasty in the freezer.

You could always use plastic or glass containers with lids, too, of course, making sure to leave plenty of headroom for when the liquid expands as it freezes. I like plastic bags because they freeze flat and airtight, making them easy to store and keeping the sauce from getting freezer-burn.

Label your bag with the contents, amount, and date (so, not anything like the one in the picture).

You will want to label your bag better than this.

My first small batch I used some of it fresh and had enough for about 1 1/2 cups of sauce for freezing. A second, larger batch yielded four two-cup bags o' sauce. I usually use about two cups of sauce in most recipes; if you have a different frequently used recipe size, feel free to adjust accordingly.

Just measure:

Cup o' sauce.

And pour into the plastic bag:

Like so.

The original recipe has a nifty trick if you're doing several of these: prop your bags up inside a large pot so they'll all stay upright, making it easier to pour the sauce into the bags. Because this can get messy.

Seal the bag, pressing to remove as much air as possible. Then shimmy it around so it lies flat, like so:

Flat for storage.

You can stack bags on a cookie sheet to help them freeze flat, then line them up once they're frozen. The flat rectangle shape saves room in the freezer and thaws more quickly than a big pooled chunk.

And that's it! You now have summer-fresh tomato sauce for all your winter cooking needs.

Sausage Spaghetti, Again

So. Y'all.

When in doubt, I make pasta. It's fast. It's easy. It's cheap. It can host endless flavor profiles.

I say endless flavor profiles. And I make pasta with cream sauces as well as tomato sauces, tuna and shrimp and ground beef and no meat at all. Asian stir fries with rice noodles and more familiar Italian-American dishes.

But let's face it. When in doubt, I make sausage spaghetti. It's as easy as a ground beef meatsauce, but automatically more flavorful because the meat's already seasoned. There are no fewer than three recipes for the stuff already on this blog, two featuring ground sausage and one with the exact same kielbasa I used last night (I mean, the same brand and whatever, not the same exact sausage that we ate three years ago. Because, gross).

I probably should combine them into one epic Sausage Pasta How To post, and perhaps I one day will.

But for today, I'm just ecstatic that I finally cooked dinner for the first time in probably two months.

Goodbye, debilitating sickness. Hello, delicious, delicious foods.

Sausage Spaghetti Redux

Boil water for pasta.

In case you need to know what that looks like.

Cut up a delicious kielbasa or other link-type sausage. Our favorite is Pederson Farms brand; I buy several of them when they go on sale at Whole Foods. But then, we don't live in the land of Trader Joe's or anything else interesting, so go with your own favorite.

Add some olive oil to a large skillet (you're going to make the sauce in it, so make sure it's big enough).

You can tell how full my pour-bottle is by how much or
how little olive oil I put in the pan.

Heat the pan.

Add your sausage and some pressed garlic to the hot pan.

Kielbasa and garlic.

Brown the sausage, about five minutes, stirring occasionally. Smell the delicious goodness.

Browned. You could drain the fat off if you like.

Toss in a can of tomato sauce and some grape tomatoes that you have lying around. Other things I like to add at this stage (if I have them) are carrots, zucchini, yellow squash (all shredded), mushrooms, diced tomatoes (fresh or canned; I was going to add a can of them to this but it was my last one), more grape or cherry tomatoes (whole or halved), sliced fennel...pretty much anything that you can either shred to add volume without impacting flavor too much, or that you like the flavor of. I, for instance, think big pieces of sliced zucchini in my pasta sauce are awesome; the DDH disagrees but will eat sauce with shredded zucchini in it.


Tomatoes.



Season to taste. I added 1 Tbs. basil, 1/2 Tbs. oregano, and 1 tsp. fennel seed. A grind or two of black pepper; the sausage was salty enough that I didn't add any salt, but your tastes (or sausage) may vary. This sausage was spicy but another trick to cut the sweetness of tomatoes and some sausages without adding sodium is to use a bit of hot pepper, such as cayenne or chile powder, or even diced jalapenos.

Three herbs.

Allow sauce to simmer while your pasta finishes cooking, or about ten minutes.

Nom nom nom.

Combine pasta and sauce* and enjoy!

Dinnertime!

*A note: The DDH wishes I wouldn't combine the pasta and sauce. And considering I was That Kid who wanted a serving of plain pasta and a serving of plain sauce next to it, not combined, I'm really not sure why I do. I think I just want to dump the pasta from the colander into the saucepan so I can wash the other pot and be done with it. And I always forget the DDH doesn't like it that way. But he has a point--when stored, the leftover pasta tends to absorb the pasta, which paradoxically makes it dry when you reheat it, which is not the tastiest.

Winter Spaghetti and Meat Sauce

I've posted a summery version of spaghetti with meat sauce here before.

But despite the ridiculous weather we've been having (it hit eighty yesterday. On the first day of March), we're still stuck with winter produce. So though last night's spaghetti was the same concept as the summer version, the ingredients, and thus the meal, differed.

Summer meat sauce is a hearty dish that still explodes with summer taste and uses up a variety of your garden's bounty.

Winter meat sauce is just meaty and warm and cheap.

Either way, it just can't be beat for a simple, fast, cheap, DDH-pleasing dinner.

It's a dish you don't really need a recipe for. But here's what I did:

Spaghetti with Meat Sauce

Cook spaghetti according to pasta directions. Drain and set aside. I used about a half package of spaghetti for about one pound of beef, which equates to two big dinner portions and two smaller lunch portions, since the DDH likes really saucy pasta. Feel free to stretch as needed or desired.

Leaning plastic bags against pots on gas burners
is not an action I recommend.

Brown 1-ish pounds ground beef in a large skillet or dutch oven (ground sausage also works really well). This takes about five minutes.

Ground beast.

Add 1 medium onion, chopped and saute for about five minutes or until onion is soft.

Add several cloves garlic and stir for thirty seconds.

Five seemed a good number.

Toss in any wintry vegetables you have around: carrot would be good. I happened to have celery.

Add 1 can diced tomatoes
 

 and 1 can tomato sauce.

You could do both of either, but I like a mixture.

Add approximately 1 tsp. salt, 1/2 tsp. pepper, and 1/8 tsp. sugar.

Add herbs and spices to taste. Some suggestions:

Basil, oregano, savory, thyme, fennel, marjoram, parsley.

I did actually use about a teaspoon of all of these (more for oregano and basil, a little less for most of the others). You sort of reach a point of diminishing returns on the different herbs, so feel free to stick with two or three favorites. My absolute "necessity" herbs for tomato sauce are oregano, basil, and fennel.

Stir well and allow to cook, uncovered on low heat, for ten to fifteen minutes. Cover and cook a little longer. It sort of depends on how much time you have and how the taste and texture seems to be developing. Leaving it uncovered too long will cook a lot of the liquid out and leave you with a pasty, meaty sauce, while covering it the whole time will leave it more liquid. The flavors meld better the longer you leave it cooking up to about a half hour, I think.

Stir in the spaghetti and serve.

It was a real shame we had no delicious crusty bread to sop up the sauce with.

So I just licked the plate instead.

Sausage Spaghetti

Remember the dinner I had planned for last week that was sabotaged by a bacon-loving DDH and a carton of fresh eggs?

This is that dinner.

And the DDH liked it, after all.

So there.

It's super fast to make (a half hour or so), cheap, tasty, filling. Honestly, pasta with some sort of meat sauce is pretty much the perfect weeknight meal.

Sausage Spaghetti

Rustle up some sausage. This should be the crumbly kind like you'd get on a pizza. You can either buy it ground or buy links, cut them open, and remove the casings.

Use whatever kind of sausage you like. I used some spinach and feta chicken sausage from my meat co-op, because it's delicious.

Crumble it into a large skillet and cook until mostly done, about six minutes. You don't want it to get burnt or dried out, as you're going to simmer it for awhile in the sauce later, but you do want it safe to eat.

A note here: in a minute, I'm going to call for some marinara sauce. You can buy marinara sauce in a jar, I guess. Or you could take a can of tomato sauce and some seasonings and make your own. Since you're going to be simmering the sauce with the sausage, the flavors will have time to meld, so you can just stir some dried herbs into the tomato sauce now. I used one can tomato sauce, 1 tsp. basil, 1 tsp. oregano, 1/2 tsp. thyme, and 1/2 tsp. marjoram.

Remove from the pan and drain. I just put some paper towels on my cutting board and dumped it out there; if you want to get more grease off, put a colander inside a bowl and put the sausage into the colander so the grease drains into the bowl. Then throw the grease away--do not pour it down your sink.

Add to the sausage grease remaining in the pan (or you could wipe out the grease and use some olive oil) some finely chopped onion. Cook, stirring, about four minutes or until soft.

Add garlic, pressed and saute for another minute or so.

Personally I would use more than two cloves.
I'm just running out of my homegrown garlic already. :-(
Good thing I planted more this year. ^_^

Stir in your sausage, 1 1/2 cups tomato sauce, and 1/3 cup water. Bring to a boil.

Reduce heat and simmer, fifteen to twenty minutes.

Meanwhile, bring a pot of water to a boil. Add some salt and a dash of olive oil.

Add spaghetti (or other pasta of your choice) to the water and cook according to package directions.

Toss the spaghetti into the sauce, stir it up to coat, and serve.

Apparently I never took a picture of the finished project. Just imagine this:

Plus this:

And it definitely equals yummy.

Lasagna

It would figure that I would manage to mess up lasagna.

I mean, there's not much easier than lasagna, right? Boil some noodles, layer with sauce and cheeses, bake until yummy.

The problem here is my tendency to not measure anything. So I mixed up a batch of sauce, only to discover that it was nowhere near enough sauce for a big ol' pan o' lasagna.

Turns out a good lasagna demands lots of sauce, or it's sort of bland and crinkly and has a funny texture.

Lesson learned, friends. Lesson learned.

Boil up your favorite lasagna noodles according to package directions. One of these days, I will actually make my own noodles for this, because my own noodles are fantabulous and I don't know why I don't make them more often.

For the sauce, I heated some olive oil, softened some onion and garlic, cooked my ground beast.

This is where I went horribly, horribly wrong. It's winter, so I had no tomatoes. I was also out of tomato sauce and, the last time I was at Sam's Club, told myself that there was no reason I should buy both canned sauce AND canned paste, when I could just sort of make tomato sauce out of tomato paste. Which, yes, that would work in theory, except that then I get into weird panicky frugal moods and decide I can't really use more than one or two cans of the paste, either, but then I don't want to have the sauce just taste like water because I diluted the paste too much, and so.

I added tomato paste thinned with water, and it was nowhere near the five cups the recipe called for, and that was a problem.

Added basil, oregano, thyme, salt: the usual Italian seasoning suspects.

Then the layers. Cottage cheese (the DDH hates ricotta), mozzarella, sauce, parmesan, noodles.

It looked cheesy and excellent going into the oven for its designated 40ish minutes at 375 (or it might have been 350. I'm not bothering to be precise since this is a recipe you shouldn't make anyway).

But as you can see...not quite enough cheese. Nowhere near enough sauce. Dried out crispy chewy noodles.

It's a shame, because lasagna is possibly the DDH's favoritest food evAr (that or pizza, it's hard to tell), and I totally failed.

He was very kind, though, and ate it all and even got seconds, so I guess it wasn't that terrible. I just don't care for lasagna to begin with, so it has to be an awesome one for me to enjoy it.

When I do it right, I'll share. In the meantime...don't make lasagna like this.

Shrimp and Pasta Stir-fry

I picked up some bok choy at the farmer's market on Saturday, so today I had to do something with it. Usually, this means a stir-fry. What a stir-fry usually seems to mean, is chicken and rice. I wanted to do something a bit different today--not to mention faster, considering pasta takes about ten minutes to cook and rice takes thirty or forty.

I cooked some liguine according to package directions:

Drained it, and set it aside:

Meanwhile, I heated a bit of sesame oil in a large pan:

Added diced onion and garlic:

And cooked:

 
until brown.

I then added some shrimp (kindly shelled by the Darling Devoted Husband):

and cut in half, since they were big little guys.

 Next, I added white wine vinegar:

oyster sauce and bottled ginger:

and soy sauce:

 Then, the bok choy:

Covered:

 and cooked for three minutes or so, until the bok choy was wilted and the shrimp were cooked.

I then added the pasta and thought I'd be done:

Unfortunately, it was pretty bland--the pasta and watery bok choy had diluted the flavor cooked into the shrimp.

So I heated a spoonful of honey until liquid:

Added some oyster sauce:

Another dollop of bottled ginger:

And some more soy sauce:

 Whisked it together with a fork, and drizzled it over the stir fry:

This worked perfectly, and the sauce itself (I licked the cup) was amazing. It would make a great dipping sauce for potstickers.

This would be great with broccoli, snow peas, water chestnuts, bamboo, mushrooms--any vegetable you can make work in an Asian context. Chicken or beef could be substituted for the shrimp, or you could leave out the meat (and the oyster sauce) to make it vegetarian.

Enjoy!