Pizza Sauce

So today is another pizza sauce day. It's a time when the family revels in the smell of freshly picked onions and garlic roasting in olive oil, filling the house with a wonderful smell.

It started later than I had intended, picking 30 pounds of tomatoes in the garden this morning. Then pulling several large purple onions and collecting two bunches of garlic from the shed where they are curing. Finally, I plucked off two handfuls of fresh basil from a couple of plants we have growing in the flower garden.

See the ingredient photo below - tomatoes get washed, cut in half, and placed in a large stockpot. Garlic and onions go into another pot with a bit of olive oil to keep them from sticking. When the garlic starts to stick and the onions are translucent more of the tomatoes go into the pot and then it simmers for a half hour.

Then we press all the hot tomatoes, garlic, and onions through a food mill and return the sauce to both pots to boil down. The basil is finely chopped and added to the pots. Stir them every 20 minutes or so all afternoon while they boil and thicken. When the volume is reduced by half and you have a nice thick sauce it is time to load canning jars and process the mixture in a boiling water bath.

We do this on two Saturday's in June and have fresh pizza sauce for the rest of the year, or dipping sauce for breadsticks. The family loves it and it's one of those things the older children miss because they can't get anything like it at the store. How could they? Fresh from the garden and bottled the same day! It doesn't get better than that.