Basic Tomato Sauce

Naomi Shulman

Tomatoes. Tomatoes, tomatoes, tomatoes. Also, did I mention tomatoes? It's been a helluva year for 'em around here. This afternoon I found myself staring at a huge bowl of perfectly ripe toms, realizing there was no way, at the rate we were going, that we would finish them all before we left for our summer's-last-gasp vacation. It was time to get serious. It was time to make sauce.

Stella and I decided to bone up on our peeling/deseeding technique with a little help from the friendly Culinary Institute of America guy. "You have to make an X, not a T," Stella summed it up. "And you have to count to ten when you drop the tomato in the hot water. But I think we should count with Mississippis in between."

Which is exactly what we did, counting one-Mississippi-two-Mississippi the whole way. After their ice bath, the tomatoes peeled just as easily as the video promised. Stella helped peel them all, then stuck around to cut the slippery naked tomatoes in half with a butter knife -- which took a while, but kept her so happily busy that I couldn't complain. I wasn't in any big rush.

The sauce itself ended up being kind of an improvisation, but very similar to this basic tomato sauce recipe. I sautéed chopped onion in olive oil, added salt and dried herbs, then added the freshly diced tomatoes, smooshing them down with a potato masher. (I also added a fairly generous splash of pinot noir.)

The sauce was fanTAStic, sweet and bright, with an absolutely irresistable aroma. I hadn't been planning on serving pasta for dinner, but really, we had no choice. Anyway, there was still plenty left over for the freezer. Stella pronounced our sauce "much, much better than what we get from a can." And she was totally right.

Make the basic tomato sauce recipe.

Naomi Shulman is a blogger and freelance writer. She lives and cooks with her husband, Chris, and daughters Lila (9) and Stella (6).