Liz can Make and Do: Tomatoes!!!

Yeah! Glorious garden tomatoes!! I love them so much, but I found myself wondering...what do I DO with all of these things? I have eaten so many this summer. I've had tomato soup, homemade pizza, spinach and ricotta stuffed tomatoes, Jambalaya (twice), salsa, you get the point. Then, I was at my sister's and she was making a bunch of hers into pasta sauce and then jarring it. Now, I don't have the equipment or the patience for that. So, luckilly I have the world's knowledge at my fingertips. I went ahead and looked up recipes for pasta sauce that you can freeze and then tried it!

I mixed a couple different recipes and made bags and bags of the stuff. Just a basic garden veggie tomato sauce that I can kind of tailor to specific recipes all winter long! Yeah!

Chopped up and thrown in the pan.

After about 30 minutes of simmering.

I chopped up all sorts of my garden vegetables and added them (tomatoes, zucchini, and 3 different types of peppers!). Plus, I got to use my fresh herbs (basil, thyme, sage, and some parsley!

Enter: One of the cooking world's greatest inventions since the toaster oven (the hand blender)

Yep, someone just left one of those behind here at my house and I snatched it right up. I am in LOVE with it. So cool. I don't have to spend 12 years taking small batches out and putting them in the blender only to have half of it splatter all over me because I didn't let it cool enough and the lid exploded off the top. Plus, you don't end up with a too smooth soup with random large chunks either. I can just stir it around, find the chunk, and BAM! it's gone. (Wow, I'd be so good at info-mercials)

I love it so much, I just might marry it!

After that, I took my pre-labeled freezer bags and stuck them in a liquid measuring cup (for easy fill) and scooped up the sauce in about 2 cups per bag. I let the bags cool a bit in the fridge and then transferred to the freezer being sure to lay them flat on top of each other so they would take up as little space as possible. That's important for me because I love to freeze pretty much everything and my freezer is jam packed.