Roasted tomato sauce

I like to kick off the tomato-sauce-making season with roasted sauce. It's perfect when you have a fair amount of tomatoes, but now enough to justify going through all the effort of canning. I found this recipe years ago in Everyday Food (you're the best, Martha), and have made it countless times since.

I start by coating my pans with plenty of olive oil, thyme, salt & pepper, then layer sliced onions, and halved & cored tomatoes. Add a little more oil on top, and toss them in the oven.

After about an hour or so they look like this.

I let them cool on the counter for a bit, and then pinch off the tomato skins.

Then I toss everything in a pot, and break out the emulsion blender. (This is the best thing ever -- and so cheap!)

Sometimes I puree just a little bit, and sometimes I make it smooth. I let it cook down for a little while, then let it cool and get it ready for the freezer. Damn, it's good!

Basil = pesto

This year I found some fancy basil seeds imported from Italy at the hardware store and decided to try growing basil from seed. Ricardo absolutely loves pesto, so I planted a whole bunch of it, and now we're on our second major basil harvest of the season.

Here's our out-of-control basil, ready for harvest.

Johnny agrees that this stuff sure smells good.

Ricardo is in charge of washing the basil and making sure there are no spiders hiding in there. (In my defense he knew I was a bug-a-phobic when he married me.)

After we pulled all the leaves off the stems, I laid them out to dry.

Meanwhile, I slowly toast the pine nuts until they're a nice golden brown.

Making pesto is actually quite easy if you have a food processor. All you need is basil, pine nuts, garlic and olive oil (and salt & pepper, of course).

I make it in batches, filling the bowl with the basil, a handful of nuts, 2 or 3 cloves of garlic, salt and pepper.

As the machine is running, I pour in olive oil until it looks something like this.

After I've got all the batches made, I combine it all into the bowl again, adding more oil and processing the pesto until it's the consistency I like. 

Voila! I put about a quarter cup of pesto in each of these little bowls, and now they're ready for the freezer. 

It's the economy, stupid

I have to admit that all this bad economic news is getting to me. Ricardo & I had our own "economic summit" a few weekends ago to go over our finances, and surprise-surprise, the conclusion was that we need to cut costs where we can.


I do most of the grocery shopping, and I think I'm a pretty good home economist, but I wanted to see for myself how much I spend per meal on a critical ingredient: meat.


Another thing I have to admit, is that I'm really choosy about my meat. Basically at this point I buy almost all of it at Whole Foods or at an occasional shopping spree at the local farmers market. Not to get all lecture-y or preach-y, but gone are the days when I can buy Purdue chicken or random ground beef from Safeway. Anyway, here's my recent bulk haul from Whole Foods: boneless chicken breasts, spicy pork Italian sausage, ground beef, and some pork.

How much does all of this cost per meal? Is one cheaper than the other? I have no idea, so let's find out. Follow me as I prepare the food for the freezer...

First, I started with the ground beef. I put aside some for tonight's taco dinner (avocados are in season and only cost a buck a piece), and I decide to make the rest into hamburgers. I pulled out one of my Weber cookbooks, and found a simple recipe for hamburgers (thanks to my dried herbs from my garden).

Okay, in a few minutes I have 6 hamburgers (3 meals) ready.

Here they are, packaged for the freezer. It may not be grilling weather just yet, but I want to be ready on the first warm day.

Next up, boneless chicken breasts. Ricardo used to give me a hard time about buying chicken from Whole Foods, but compared to Safeway's organic brand, it's much cheaper and way better tasting. Ricardo and I can only eat a half breast between the two of us, so I cut them up and trim off the yucky parts.

Then, the trouble starts. Samantha smells chicken.

Samantha loves any kind of bird. But raw chicken is her favorite.

When I take too long to fill up her treat bowl with the scraps, she climbs up as high as she can, giving out a loud, demanding meow.

Okay, Samantha's head is now deep in her bowl, allowing me to finish cutting up the chicken, and sealing them up in individual bags, and then packing four servings together in another bag, for an added layer of protection.

And here's the spicy Italian pork sausage, each one wrapped in parchment so they won't stick together, then put in a big zip lock. I don't usually buy 8 at a time, but they were on sale, and Ricardo loves sausage on his pizza. (I like to peel the label off the package and stick it in the bag.)

Here's everything, ready for the freezer. If you decide to do this, make sure you label the packages with the date. I used to think I'd remember what's what, but it's all too easy to get confused. (I use freezer tape, and I love it -- it stays on but is also easy to peel off with no residue.) Also, I've been re-using my ziplock bags in another attempt to save money -- it's kinda a pain in the neck to wash them, but I figure it's worth the extra effort.

And here's everything put away in my giant freezer (along with a lot of other stuff like my homemade raviolis, chicken broth, tomato sauce and pesto).

I broke out the calculator, and was pretty pleased with the results.

Cost for a dinner for two:

boneless chicken breasts: $2.75

ground beef: $2.85

sausage: $1.08 (but there's also the cost of cheese to consider)

pork cutlets: $2.71

Not bad!

Making & canning applesauce

We bought 4 bags of apples at Homestead because I've always wanted to make homemade applesauce, and Ricardo has always wanted to EAT homemade applesauce.

This is what I started with -- 12 pounds of apples.

Peeling, coring and slicing seemed to take forever. They're soaking in a lemon juice and water mixture to keep them from browning.

The cooking process is really quite easy -- I just added a little water and boiled until the apples were fork-tender. I had to use two pots because they didn't all fit in one.

Here's what the apples look like while cooking.

After they're cooked, I processed half of the apples in my Cuisinart, and mashed half by hand (because I wanted a chunky sauce). Then I added sugar & spices.

Voila! A big pot of yummy spiced chunky applesauce, ready for canning.

And here's the final result. Of course I didn't can it all so that my official taster could enjoy fresh hot applesauce. I believe his official quote was something like "Damn, that's good!".

Canning, part deux

After my first canning exerience, I couldn't wait to go back to the hardware store for more jars, this time I got jelly jars.

Making jam was fairly quick and easy. I made up a batch of peach (for Ricardo) and blueberry (for me) jam.

I had a bunch more tomatoes, and this time I decided to be more ambitious and make tomato sauce. Otherwise known as the magic tomato shrinking process.

I just had to show off my biggest tomato so far, it's a heirloom named "mortgage lifter." The story behind it is that the tomatoes were so big that the farmer was able to pay off his mortgage.

After peeling, coring, seeding and chopping, two big bowls of tomatoes become one.

And they continue to shrink after they're put through the food processer and put on the stove.

In the end after many hours of boiling, I'm left with 2 and a half quarts of sauce. But hey, that's gonna be one heck of a lasagne on Christmas Eve.

And here's my collection, ready for the pantry. I've already been combing the cookbooks for my next experiment.

My latest obsession: canning

Our tomato harvest is starting to become unmanageable, so I've decided to take on canning as my latest project. I've never canned before, but I bought some books, read some websites and got some advice from others. My local hardware store had all the supplies I needed, and I had about 40 tomatoes on hand, so here we go!

I decided to start with tomatoes packed in water because that process seemed a little easier than others. Here are my guinea pigs, ready to be skinned, cored and quartered.

I wasn't sure that giant pot would fit on my stove! The whole process was different than I expected -- more like a science project than a cooking project, but it was very satisfying...

Especially at the end when I ended up with these five beauties!