Tomato Sauce

I am so glad I had stocked my freezer before E arrived (with Giz's help and the help of a friend).  I try to be productive during the day, but between our outings (necessary for maintaining my sanity), nursing and E's strong preference for being held (read: tendency to cry her head off when she isn't being held), it can be challenging to get much done.  Particularly chores that can't be dropped part way through.

(I can never get enough of these "ugly cry" pictures)

Thankfully, my cousin has been in town for the past week and a half.  I told her that, aside from the whole "husband-sharing" thing, I thinking having a sister-wife would be great.  With her love of babies, she happily entertained E while I made tomato sauce using up the tomatoes from our garden.

I blanched the plum tomatoes to get skin off.   

Then I diced the tomatoes, along with garlic and shallots.  I brought the tomatoes to a boil and let it boil down for about 45 minutes.

Since I didn't have enough tomatoes to make it worth canning, I went ahead and prepared sauce with other ingredients like roasted red pepper (finally finishing off the 1.5L jar that Giz felt we needed in our fridge), artichokes, herbs and chilli peppers.  This is the base of many of our pasta sauces.  

I then froze the sauce ( I just need to remember to add a bit of sugar when I warm up the sauce because it's a bit on the acidic side).

There's something so satisfying about growing the food yourself and making it from scratch.  Here's what we started with:

Part way through the season: