THE BOUNTY OF THE EARTH

It's a busy time here at Sweet Briar Cottage.  The garden is producing and we are kept hopping harvesting and preserving.  It is such a joy to go out and pick our dinner.  One day a meal of sauteed  summer squash,onions and tomatoes  all fresh from the garden.  The next day a tomato sandwich warm from the sun. Another day new potatoes just dug minutes before popping them in the pot.  Not to mention the corn and melons!   Life is good.  You can't help but believe in miracles when think back to the fact that just a few months before we were planting seeds,some no bigger than a grain of sand, that are now food that nourishes both body and soul.  You'll never take your food for granted if you have labored over a plot of land weeding and hoeing, harvesting and preserving.  I'll guarantee you that!

We make a lot of this oven roasted spaghetti sauce.  As a matter of fact, I can't make enough of it.  So good!  It uses a lot of tomatoes, but that is what makes it taste so delicious.  The good thing about this recipe is that you don't have to peel the tomatoes, so if you do what I do and plant too many of those cherry tomatoes, you can use them in this recipe.  And since those are usually the sweetest ones, your sauce will turn out especially good!

Oven Roasted Spaghetti Sauce

7 lbs. of tomatoes
1/2 dozen garlic cloves (or more if you really like garlic)
1/2 dozen onions
1/4 C. olive oil
1 tsp. salt
1 C. fresh  herbs (I use lots of oregano and basil. And rosemary, thyme, fennel and chives.  But feel free to use what you like best)
pepper
1/4 C. sugar
3-4 peppers, seeds removed and roughly chopped

Preheat oven to 450 degrees.  Coat a large roasting pan with the olive oil.  Wash and remove the stems from the tomatoes.  Roughly chop the onions.  and wash the herbs.  Place all the ingredients in the roasting pan.  It will look like this:














Roast for a half hour.  Give it a stir.  Roast for an additional half hour and stir again.  Roast for another hour, watching it carefully that last half hour so it doesn't burn.  The top will start to brown and the liquid will evaporate.  The tomatoes will become soft and the herbs and onions will start to meld together.  It will cook down quite a bit.  Here's how it will look:

Take it from the oven and put the mixture through a food mill.  Now you can freeze the sauce or do what I do and  pressure can it.  Pints are processed at 10 pound of pressure for 35 minutes.

BTW, yes that is a plastic bag drying in the background.  I never thought I'd become one of those people (i.e. an old fuddy duddy), but they've become so expensive, I do now.  I have purchased a lot of covered containers from garage and estate sales and rarely use plastic wrap anymore too.  Of course, I recycle a lot of containers too for that purpose, like Cool Whip containers. :)