With love, from my little kitchen to you...: harvest and sauce

So, this past weekend we picked a ridiculous amount of vegetables. Our biggest harvest to date, the majority of which were tomatoes.Sooo Manyyy Tomatooooes!
And what better to do with a ton of tomatoes than make sauce. So here goes...

Here's all the ones we picked:

And here are all the ones I made my sauce with:

Let's begin.

Normally I only use tomatoes, onions, peppers, garlic and basil. But I read a recipe online that said to start with mirepoix (celery, carrot, onion), so I thought I would try that. And into the pan they went.

Next step: blanch the tomatoes. Doing this makes peeling the tomato very easy. To start, make a small "x" mark on the tomato. then drop them in boiling water for about 30 seconds, then take them out and drop them in ice water to stop them from cooking.

Next step: remove the skins and the seeds. This step is very easy. Very messy. But very easy.

Once you remove the tomatoes from the ice bath, the skin will basically be falling off of them.

Remove all the skin then quarter them so you can remove the seeds.

To remove the seeds, simply squeeze them out with your hands. Reserve the juice if you want to use it for something else.

Next step: chop 'em and toss 'em in the pot with the veggies. At this point I also threw in a bunch of fresh basil and some garlic powder. fresh garlic is best, but I forgot to get some, so I used the powdered stuff. (Oh, and I have no photos of this step because I got a phone call and forgot to take some. But you can figure it out).

Let them cook for a while, then run a hand blender through them to make it smoother.

If you don't have a hand blender, get one. Otherwise, run the tomatoes through a regular blender before adding them to the pot.

Next step: simmer.

By simmering the sauce at a low temperature for a while, the water will evaporate out, and you/ll be left with a nice, thick, rich sauce. As you check on it and stir it, taste it to see if it needs more salt, sugar, garlic, or whatever.

As you can see, the longer it simmers, the lower the level gets on the pan (see the inside of the pan where the sauce was when it started simmering?).