2023 Recipe TUESDAY – #1
Tomato Spaghetti sauce
21 ripe farmers market tomatoes, peeled
3 sweet white onions
1 cup garlic (measure with your heart)
1/4 cup Italian seasoning (2 palm fulls)
1/8 cup garlic rosemary bread seasoning from Publix (1 palm full)
(*approximate measurements, more about proportions.)
—> Bolognese Sauce
Above plus:
Ground beef cooked with Montreal seasoning (to taste)
Excess fat removed
And then trust me: ——add KALE 👌
Super boost of Vitamin C and iron 💪
This experiment starts about 6 months ago when I received a huge box of Farmers Market tomatoes unexpectedly. No one in my family eats tomatoes except myself.
So what does one do with 30-odd tomatoes and an average liking of the fruit?
Make an fried egg and tomato sandwich of course!
(With our very own fresh eggs! If you need some hit up DocMayberry’s Farmers Market on our home page)
I made it “fancy” to my taste that day with some basalmic glaze, green onion and pickled onions. Heavy on the onions 🤣. I couldn’t find real cheese, so I used up some left over cream cheese. Lots of pepper and some sea salt. Strange craving day.
When I built the house we currently live in I made sure I had a 36” freezer because I was SICK of throwing away so many spoiled foods.
I learned that many foods do excellent in the freezer and it’s a healthy way to keep foods at the height of their ripeness / readiness.
So after my 2 tomato sandwiches I froze the rest and forgot about them.
Yesterday my husband got a big freezer haul and we had to pull out my tomatoes. So I ran them under the boiling water spout and peeled them easily, put them in a big bowl and left them in the fridge.
This morning I came back to my huge vat of frozen tomatoes. They seeped quite a bit of clear fluid without their skins. You will want to pour this out. Don’t. It is liquid sunshine and full of vitamin C.
My family only eats tomatoes in spaghetti sauce. Otherwise I probably would have tried a delicious Tomato Basil Soup. So, spaghetti sauce it was.
TOMATOES, onions, GARLIC, Italian seasoning, rosemary, bay leaves.
(The variation in color of garlic is due to me using up all our frozen garlic and adding some fresh garlic. And technically I used one purple onion & 2 white onions because the purple one needed to be eaten instead of using all 3 of the same type of onion)
I broke out my blender but of course it had to be charged and died on me.
I put two palmfuls of Italian seasoning and one palmful of Publix’s garlic rosemary bread blend —and hoped for the best.
Then my husband had to see what the commotion was and he pulled out the real machinery for such a big job and got me the Vitamix.
It was quick work now I had reinforcements.
After the spaghetti “soup” was complete and mixed I filled a large jar and put it in the fridge with 2 bay leaves on top. The rest went in quart sized freezer bags with a bay leaf (I have a lot of bay leaves).
So now to convert this to a meal my family would eat, my husband now invested in the process cooked up some ground beef to make it bolognese. He also got some REAL parmesan cheese 🥰.
The meat was seasoned to his liking with this industrial sized bottle of Montreal seasoning we got at Costco for another recipe I tried to follow.
I made some egg noodles from Trader Joe’s because my tummy likes them so much better than other noodles.
Then we drained most of the pasta water out. I read somewhere that keeping about a cup of pasta water helps the sauce meld with the sauce. Apparently it’s science and now all my sauces are a bit on the runny side. Maybe cream would help that…?
I didn’t want to make more dishes so I mixed it right in the pasta pot 🤷♀️.
Proportions.
Mixed. (Don’t forget to remove the bay leaves)
Plated.
And the kale is a happy addition from my husband ♥️ Genius! The bright notes in the fresh tomato eliminate the bitterness in the kale.
If you are anemic this is great. The iron from the ground beef is better absorbed with the wealth of vitamin C that accompanies it.
VERDICT:
10 out of 10. Can’t wait to eat again and probably the only way I’ll ever eat kale.
Recycling Ideas:
-Use tomato garlic sauce in 1:1 ratio with rice for a nice side dish. Possibly add turmeric and fresh ground black pepper for its anti-inflammatory effects.