Sugo mania

Yesterday a friend and I decided to go the CERES organic market in East Brunswick (a place I haven't visited in aaages) to pick up some lovely locally grown produce. There we stumbled across a few 10kg boxes of their own tomatoes and seeing them was really all we needed - within a few hours (OK, quite a few hours as also had to get coffee, have lunch etc etc) we had bottled our own tomato sauce, ready for whipping up quick pasta dinners.



And there are more snaps on Flickr.

The recipe is a trusty one, given to my friend's boyfriend by an old Italian, and I've done my best to remember it here! Oh, and we used a mouli to separate the seeds and onion from the sauce, although I'm sure there are other things you could use (a sieve might be hard but might do the job...)

Fresh Tomato Sauce

Box of tomatoes (we had 10kg!)
3-4 onions, diced
4 cloves garlic, crushed
A few dashes of olive oil
Salt, pepper to taste
Fresh basil leaves

1. Quarter tomatoes and toss into a big saucepan (you may need to do this in batches - we did our 10kg in 5 batches) and splash in some water. Simmer on stover for about 15 minutes until the tomatoes have collapsed.

2. Strain in sieve to remove excess liquid (which you can keep for a soup stock or other tomato-ish stock).

3. Put back in saucepan and add onion and garlic (our 10kg reduced enough so that we now had two big saucepans half full) and simmer for a further 15 minutes or until onion and garlic have softened and cooked.

4. Cool for a little bit then process through a mouli to separate the sauce from the tomato seeds and onion; discard seeds and onion and bottle your sauce! Top each bottle with a basil leaf.

I think it'll keep a while as we bottled ours in jars that were 'sterilised'. OK, so technically they might not be sterile, but close enough - we washed and cleaned them in soapy water, then left in the oven on 160 degrees celcius for 3o mins or so.

**UPDATE** It's probably a good idea to either use proper preserving jars (with tight rubber seals) OR store in fridge OR just put in plastic containers and freeze, else your sauce may not last long on the bookshelf :(


And on a completely different note, above is a print I bought from Ashley G (aka Kitty Genius) via her Etsy shop ages back, that I only just got around to framing. It's printed on archival matte poly/cotton canvas (lovely texture, almost like fabric) and the frame is white, of the box variety. So cute!