Summer will officially end this week, but I’ve felt it coming. There has been a chill in the air when I go out to the hot tub at night and last night it rained. Every day I have been harvesting tomatoes from our tiny garden and I keep thinking that each harvest will be the last, but they keep on coming. I had so many today I had to make another batch of tomato sauce,
I have written before about my lack of culinary skills, so making tomato sauce was a challenge for me. I kept my laptop with me in the kitchen so I could Google for emergency directions. I found a recipe that didn’t require exotic ingredients and collected the necessary equipment. The first step was to peel the tomatoes. I vaguely remembered that it involved boiling water and a slotted spoon. Google found me explicit directions and soon tomato skins were effortlessly sliding off the fruit.
The recipe called for several cloves of garlic. Is a clove just one of the sections of the bulb or the whole bulb? Google once again answered my question. One of the segments is a clove of garlic.
The preparation process probably took an hour: Google, skin, chop and stir. The pot of sauce has been simmering all day. It has reduced down to half the original volume. We had spaghetti for dinner, with what the spouse called V-5 sauce, because it has five vegetables.
I read a blog ( The Simple Dollar) about frugality and once a week there is a feature about frugal tactics that might not save money. Making your own tomato sauce probably falls into the no savings category. Even though the tomatoes were free from my garden and there was no cost for my labor, I have no idea what it cost for that giant pot of vegetables to bubble on the stove for hours. So we had one free meal of tomato sauce tonight and as soon as the sauce cools down, I’ll put another five containers in the freezer. All that work to save $2.50 on a bottle of spaghetti sauce? I’ll have to be satisfied with the praise from my family….
Me: “How is it?”
Son: “It’s okay.”
Spouse: “It certainly has better flavor than that bottled sauce.”
Such high praise. I should cook more often!
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