When life gives you tomatoes, make sauce!

It’s the time of year when you might have a glut of tomatoes growing in the garden, or like me, noticed your local supermarket has a great offer on fantastic Italian San Marzano tomatoes, then it’s time for one thing and one thing only…try my easy tomato sauce recipe! Bulk making sauce for the freezer is the best way to save that amazing flavour of summer and turn those tomatoes into a ready to go meal, and infinitely better than anything you can buy in a jar. It is easy to do it just takes a bit of time now which is ultimately time you’ll save in the future. Ingredients

• 1 Kilo (2 pounds) Fresh Tomatoes
• 1 Large Handful of Fresh Basil
• 1 Very good pinch of Sea Salt

Half the tomatoes and remove the central part that the stalk attached to, but don’t worry about remove the seeds or the skin. Dice them into rough small chunks and place in a large pan. Chop or tear up the basil and get that in the pan too along with the salt. Put on a low heat and after about 10 minutes you should see lots of liquid appear. This is what we want to reduce out of them. Give a good stir and continue cooking for about 1-1 ½ hours.

We want the sauce to have reduced by about 50%. At this point you can use a hand blender, but I prefer to use a spoon to smash up the bits of tomato. I feel it gives a more rustic, textured finish. Of course do what you need to get the consistency you like. Now let that go completely cold before decanting into food bags or boxes. For reference about 200g/7oz is a healthy portion! So next time you want pasta just soften some onion or garlic or both in olive oil and add you frozen sauce. The reason we don’t add these to the original sauce is you will get a much better, fresher flavour doing it this way, and it’s easily done in the time it takes to boil you pasta of choice. Tell me how this worked out for you in the comments below, I’d love to hear! Michael