What to do with all the tomatoes??

  Tomatoes. You either love them or hate them. I'm of the former, as well as my husband. Our oldest daughter sometimes likes them. Our unruly 3 year old does not like them. The baby doesn't care.

 Last year, we bought 19 various heirloom tomato plants. We ended up with a nasty tomato disease- never did completely figure out if it was 'Early Blight' or something else. However, we ended up with quite a good amount of tomatoes. I ate alot of salads, gave alot away, and ended up canning 3 pints of them.

 For the in-experienced homegrown/homemade foodie, 3 pints doesn't seem like alot. When I pulled out the Ball Blue Book today, it said to start with about 10 lbs of tomatoes, and the final product would yield about 3 pints. I'd forgotten this fact, while I was covered with tomatoes.

 This year we were a bit more conservative with our tomato plants. We tried almost unsucessfully to start our own plants from seeds- we ended up with 1 cherry tomato plant that's survived. (Ironically, my mom had a couple of volunteer cherry tomato plants come up, and is essentially what led me to today's tomato project.)  We've had enough tomatoes to satisfy our needs.
 
But then my mom unloaded two huge bowls of cherry tomatoes on us. Some quick research indicated there are many many ways to preserve them. Many people suggested just freezing them. Some dehydrating, then freezing. Dehydrating, then packing in oil. Dehydrating, then grinding.

I have frozen them before. And I still might do that, if there is a surplus later. I originally thought of making salsa, since we had some very hot peppers also in our garden. But I didn't have all the ingredients I needed, and plus, I just didn't feel like doing all that.

I decided to do a basic tomato sauce, then we could use it for soup or spaghetti or whatever. But I really really didn't want to strain out the seeds. Seemed too wasteful. Plus today is just a day where I didn't want more steps than necessary.
 
I started with a pot of boiling water, and a bowl of ice water. I blanched all of the 'good' tomatoes, whether they were from our garden or moms.

 In a larger pot, I heated some cold pressed extra virgin olive oil, chopped up some garlic, 3 onions from the garden slightly bigger than golf balls. I also added a green pepper of some sort from mom's garden, and a 'Cajun Bell' from ours. Then I started peeling the tomatoes. Wasn't hard work, but it was tedious, since I was using small tomatoes (since that's what we had). I eventually went ahead and cut the bad spots off of the other random tomatoes from our garden and moms, and peeled them and chopped them into the pot.

All tomatoes finally peeled!

Final product after the stick blender to chop it all up. Added a few sprigs of rosemary. I love rosemary.

I later tried this over some leftover whole wheat pasta with some fresh spinach. I wont say it's the best sauce I've ever had, but I think I did pretty good for making my own sauce from scratch with ingredients I grew myself (except for the garlic & olive oil).

Have you ever made tomato sauce from scratch? How did it work out? If you have a recipe, please share it in the comments below!