Homemade Marinara Sauce

This is a long task. Be forewarned. Long task.

Its worth it though. This is one of those things you start on a Saturday morning and let cook all day as you do your weekly housecleaning.

It makes the house smell yummy too.

I suppose you could do this as a slow cooker thing. No reason why not.

First and foremost, pour yourself a nice tall glass of Wild Cherry Pepsi. Or wine. Wine is good too.

Ready?

Ok.

The ingredient list is long.

Tomatoes-Roma 6-10.

1 onion

1 bell pepper

5-6 cloves garlic

Some sort of squash, zuchinni or yellow squash. 1 should be fine

Carrots, 2-3.

Celery, 1 or 2 stalks

Mushrooms. 5 or 6 pounds. Just kidding! Geez! 5 or 6 should be fine. Baby Bella's if you can find them for a reasonable price or wild mushrooms work well too.

On occasion I will throw in broccoli, artichokes, sun dried tomatoes, or eggplant. This can totally be one of those whatever is left of my veggie drawer kind of thing.

Wine. A little for you, a little for the sauce.

So let's start with that.

Chop onion, pepper, and celery (trinity) into bits. Chop garlic coarsely.

Saute in olive oil until translucent and smelling yummy. Sprinkle some salt and pepper in there.

While getting all happy, chop everything else into bits or chunk. However you like your veggies. I like mine chunky.

These are examples of chunks. 

Asparagus. I totally forgot to mention asparagus. This works too, or you can use it as a side for the noodles later.

Toss everything else but tomatoes in and saute for a few minutes. 

Put in tomatoes. I usually end up using more than I think I need. I said 10 above. Sometimes its more. Depends on how many other veggies I put in.

Beautiful makings this is. In the above picture, I cheated. I used some tomatoes and a can as well. I didn't have a ton of fresh left and didn't feel like getting out for just mater's.

No worries. You can do the same. I won't hunt you down, I promise. (Fingers crossed behind back)

Add a dash of red wine. Take a sip. Ok another. Maybe one more.

Add a tablespoon of sugar.

Now on to the herbage.

Important stuff, herbage is.

Here we have...

Oregano

Basil

Garlic powder (cause you can never have too much garlic)

Lemon Pepper

Here's how much to use of each.

About that much. Can you tell I don't like measuring herbage?

Measuring is overrated. 

Ok. Baking is the ONLY exception.

Err on the side of too little and you'll be fine.

If you are anal about measuring...this is about 1.5 tsp, give or take.

So for the oregano, 1 of those is fine. For the garlic 2-3, basil 2-3, lemon pepper 1 or 2. If you have rosemary, 1 is good. 

Fresh is always better, but its not quite time yet to be able to have fresh unless you want to pay out the nose at the store or have and indoor herb garden.

Sigh.

One of these days.

Cook the sauce slowly, on lowish for awhile. The longer it cooks, the better it is.

When you are ready to use it, cook your noodles in salted boiling water (I used ravioli this night)

Fix a veggie (Asparagus this time)

And maybe some bread - Freddies had foccacia in the used bread section so I used that. Have I mentioned my love of used bread? Seriously. Why pay full price?

This is what the whole she-bang looks like. So worth the wait. 

I generally make a huge recipe and freeze it for later. The measurement above feed a fam of 5.