Easy Roasted Garden Tomato Sauce

Some of us (me) planted A LOT of tomato plants this year.  And while I love the idea of growing lots of things, watering my plants, weeding the ground around them, and harvesting things as they ripen, that leaves me in a place of having to come up with what to do with those veggies.  Most of them we have no problem polishing off as soon as they leave the plant, but tomatoes are a little trickier.  One or two nice tomatoes are great to slice up and serve on sandwiches or cook in something, but what do you do when you have a whole basket of them and have epic fail when it comes to salsa making?

This is my harvesting colander and I've filled it to overflowing twice now with just tomatoes.  I can't eat that many sandwiches.

Two things we do eat a lot of though are eggplant lasagna (which I also make with zucchini sometimes instead of eggplant) and pizza, both of which require tomato sauce.  So I hunted for a homemade sauce recipe and immediately abandoned most of them as soon as I read the word "blanch".  No thanks.  I have no time for such nonsense.

So I combined several recipes that seemed simple enough and made my own even simpler version that is delicious in it's simplicity.

You can use any kind of tomatoes, but for the simplest version, Roma tomatoes are the way to go.

Ingredients:

Tomatoes (cut out the cores if you are using large tomatoes)
Whole garlic cloves
Olive oil
Italian seasoning

Preheat your oven to 225 degrees.

On a baking sheet (I add a silicone liner to make clean-up easier), place all your tomatoes.  If you are using large tomatoes, place a clove of garlic in the center of each.  For Roma tomatoes, just spread 4-6 cloves out on the pan amongst the tomatoes.  Drizzle with olive oil.

Roast for 2-4 hours, depending on how much time you have and how large the tomatoes are.  You will know they are done when they look like this.

Dump all the tomatoes and garlic into your blender and blend it to oblivion.  Add a few dashes of Italian seasoning and blend it a little more to mix it in.

 Now, if you used big tomatoes, they have a lot more seeds and juices on the inside, so your sauce is going to be kind of watery.  That's really easy to remedy by putting it on the stove on a low simmer to let it reduce down.  If you just used Roma tomatoes, you're all set at this point.  Jar it up and call it dinner.