Week 10 – Home Alone

This weeks box contains:

Corn

Potatoes

2 Peppers

a Red Onion

a yellow Squash

lettuce

Apples

Nectarines

Slicing tomatoes

Cherry Tomatoes

Possibly the most difficult of all cooking tasks is cooking for one.  Eating for many of us is a communal activity.  We eat family dinners, we take date out to dinner, we cook for groups and we eat in groups. Food packaging for the most part assumes that the end result will feed multiple people.  Recipes are almost always designed for a group rather than a single.  My friend Orrick and I have discussed writing a cookbook for single diners…Cooking for One.  Maybe someday we will get it off the ground.

So what is a guy to do when his family takes off for a few days?  Almost everything in my pantry assumes it will be used to cook for four.  Well, I decided that I would make something that I can eat while they are gone, and will be able to freeze and use when they come back.  August is the heart of Tomato season.  Last week’s Tabouli recipe is one way I love fresh tomatoes.  But there is just no way I could eat all that over the weekend.

There are hundreds of tomato varieties. From marble-sized grape or cherry tomatoes, to juicy salad tomatoes, meaty paste tomatoes, and huge, sweet, beefsteak tomatoes. Their colors range from deep crimson to orange, yellow, green, purple, and chocolate.  For more on Tomato varieties and their best use check out http://www.grow-it-organically.com/tomato-varieties.html.

I decided to make sauce.  Tomato sauce isn’t difficult, but it can be time consuming.  This Week’s Box contains a red onion, which I’ll use along with the slicing tomatoes.  Luckily, I have been growing tomatoes in my home garden, and so has my mom.  Together, we have a little over 5lbs of fruit.  I also have a huge basil plant and wil take basil as well.  This will make quite a nice batch of sauce.  So I’ll double the recipe below.  Many recipes I saw called for Roma tomatoes. These are great, have very few seeds, and a beautiful red meat.  They are not required.  Any good fresh tomato will do.

Tomato Sauce

2-3 pounds tomatoes

¾ Teaspoon salt

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 Tablespoon tomato paste

1 Cup good Red wine

3-4 garlic cloves minced very fine

¼ Cup basil chopped well

1 carrot peeled

1 medium onion chopped

Cut tomatoes in half horizontally. Squeeze out the seeds as best you can.   Discard the seeds.

Heat the oil in a large pot.  Add the onion and garlic and sauté until the onion is just getting tender.  Add the tomatoes and set the heat to medium.  The tomatoes are going to release a lot of liquid.  That is to be expected.  After a few minutes, the tomato peel will release as well.  Try to pull as many of the peels off as possible.  You can get them later, but as the sauce cooks, the peels get harder to find.

Once the tomatoes have started to soften and you’ve removed as many of the peels as possible, and the wine, salt, carrot, olive oil, and tomato paste. Bring the sauce to a boil, then lower the heat to low and let it simmer.

Cook the sauce until it is reduced by half.  Stir the sauce occasionally and adjust as needed.   If the sauce is too thin, add a little tomato paste.  If it gets too thick, add a little liquid.  Taste and adjust salt.

Let the sauce cool, and remove the carrot.  If you like a smooth sauce, process the sauce in your food processor for a few seconds.  If you like it chunky, leave it as is.  Package it into any size container that works for you.  The sauce will freeze well and will keep for several weeks in the freezer.

Enjoy!