You say Marinara, I say Tomato Sauce...

We ate simple grilled chicken and steamed broccoli last night, but I did find time to make some homemade marinara sauce. I froze most of it, and put a little in the fridge for this week. As I mentioned here, I'm not a big fan of chunks in my tomato sauce. I like the sauce nice and smooth, good for pasta and pizzas, alike. Do you know what this, my need of smooth tomato sauce, means? Happy days are here again, I get to use my emulsion blender! Now if you still don't have an emulsion blender you could use a regular blender, but really you can eat this sauce with out blending it. I just really don't like chunks, specifically chunks of tomato (yes I have a weird food texture thing).

This is an easy, sort of quick tomato sauce. You will need: Tomatoes (2 28oz cans whole peeled tomatoes), 1 medium onion, Garlic (I usually use 4 cloves), 1 small bunch Fresh Basil, dried Italian Seasoning, 2 dried red hot chili peppers, olive oil, salt, and pepper.

Before we start I'd like to talk about the tomatoes. Really you can use any type of canned whole tomatoes, but I usually buy a brand with a made in Italy stamp on it. I think they taste better. Also when tomatoes are in season, I usually use a mixture of fresh and canned tomatoes.

On to the recipe. Chop up your onion and garlic cloves. In your pot, pour in a few glugs of Olive Oil, turn heat onto Medium and toss in the onion and garlic. We want them to get soft and translucent. As they are cooking, wash your basil and remove the leaves from the stem, toss them in with the onion and garlic; also crumble in the 2 dried red hot chili peppers (trust me on these), and pour in half a palmful of Italian Seasoning. Stir together. Once the onions are nice and soft pour in the 2 cans of tomatoes, stir everything together, bring to a simmer and cover. Now you can simmer the sauce for a little bit of time, or a long amount of time. The longer you simmer, the more water will evaporate out and the thicker the sauce will become. I usually let my sauce simmer for 25 mins. Once I remove the sauce from heat, I let it cool down a little bit before I use the emulsion blender. This is quite important, as the emulsion blender can be a bit messy, and well get splattered with hot tomato sauce hurts, alot, and it creates laundry. After you blend the sauce, taste, and add salt, pepper, and more Italian seasoning as needed. If you aren't blending, do this after the sauce has cooled of a little.

Now you can eat the sauce right away, or you can put it in Tupperware and freeze or refrigerate it. My sauce is in the freezer, and I'm sure I'll have a post in the next week or so detailing what I ended up using it for.

And voila that is my marinara sauce, for a meal, next week.