Easy Homemade Marinara

Since it has been raining off and on here this week and one of my projects (roadside rescue) got rained on and then I put it outside to dry in the sun and it rained again; I had to move on to other things. This isn't really a tutorial, but what having a bunch of tomatoes can INSPIRE you to do when your dehydrator dies!! :)

We make a ton of homemade salsa in this family so we have about 10 tomatoes plants. They are all of the small variety since the bigger tomatoes have too much JUICE...:) and the skins are too tuff (and I am too lazy to skin a tomato) So even with all of the salsa we make, we still had an abundance of tomatoes. We had a variety of grape and chocolate cherry tomatoes. As I said my dehydrator disintegrated after my 2nd batch of sun dried tomatoes this year, so I had to figure another way to use what I had. No recipe really...I am too A.D.D. to follow a recipe anyway, and the artist in me just likes to CREATE!. So with music blaring on the ipod, I started chopping up my tomatoes. (now I know most recipes call for skinning the tomatoes..but there was no way I was skinning a grape tomato..)

So with my tomatoes chopped, I started to saute some onion and when that was done added some chopped garlic...(my kids do not like CHUNKS) Use a little bit of oil to saute these.

Then you start to boil. I used my spoon to SMUSH the tomatoes, because as I said...my kids don't like CHUNKS.

Once the tomatoes had broken down I added some sauce and some red wine, AGAIN this is too taste..one of the great things about cooking is tasting and seeing how its coming along and changing. You let the sauce simmer for about 30-40 minutes and when it is done I topped with some of my fresh basil from the garden. This marinara turned out wonderful and I ended up with 4 big Tupperware in the freezer that I can use to make all my Italian dishes this winter..like baked spaghetti and my favorite Eggplant Marinara bread.

I hope this inspired you to cook something BEAUTIFUL today.