Custom Tomato Sauce

Tomato sauce is great because it is cheap, nutritious, easy to prepare, very customizable, useful for multiple meals (rice, pasta, pizza, sandwiches) and it can be frozen in individual portions or enough for a large group!

Making tomato sauce is very easy, here is the recipe for a simple sauce:

Ingredients: Canned crushed or diced tomatoes (or a mix of the two) Instructions: Place the tomatoes in a sauce pan and simmer (make it bubble very slow, usually on low to medium heat) for about an hour stirring about every 15 minutes.

Now, even this simple recipe has ways to vary it to change the sensory experience of eating it.

If the chunks of tomato are bothersome use crushed tomatoes or cook longer. If they are wonderful you can have even more by using canned whole tomatoes and cutting them into very large pieces.

Cooking it longer (you can cook as long as you want, 8 hours is not unheard of, adding water is okay) will make it thicker and have a more intense flavour.

By adding more ingredients you can do so many wonderful things!

To make it thicker: At or near the start add one or more of the following: flower, corn starch, cream cheese (or other cheeses) and tomato paste.

When adding the flower and corn starch it is best to put a small amount of the tomatoes or some water in a bowl and mix it with the powder before mixing it in a large large pot. This means it easier to prevent unpleasant clumps. These two ingredients won't have a huge impact on flavour.

The other ingredients (including the tomato paste) will significantly alter the flavour.

Making it thinner: Add: Milk, water, cream, tomato juice,

If you want to make a more flavourful sauce consider adding one or a combination of the following: Spices (I recommend ground spices instead of crushed or whole, this will dramatically reduce the change in texture and appearance of the sauce) (add these between 15 and 30 minutes before serving) good spices are: Cayenne pepper Oregano Parsley Basil Rosemary Tyme Sage Bay leafs (add at start of cooking and remove before serving, avoid ground ones) Garlic (not garlic salt) you can use fresh pressed or granulated, or if you have the time and energy minced and fried in butter or oil has a subtle but wonderful different flavour Black pepper Salt There are other spices that work too but I'm not very familiar with them. Some found in curry can be amazing in tomato sauce.

Vegetables: Me and vegetables don't have a very good relationship so this section is going to be shorter than I'd like: Peas: cook separately and add just before serving Carrots and potatoes, cut to your favourite size, tenderness scales with size and cooking time (longer and smaller mean more tender) Peppers, consider peeling to avoid texture issues, these dramatically alter the flavour of the sauce. Onions, cut to size (if you cut them small enough you won't notice the texture at all) these must be fried on low to medium heat in butter and or oil until tender before adding tomatoes to the pot.

Meat: There is no limit to what kinds of meat or meat combinations that can be added. Ground meats should be added at the start of the cooking process with or without pre frying.

Diced meat can be added at the start of or later in the process (later means less tender, cook it long enough and it can disintegrate).

My favourite meat to add is beef, but you can add just about anything. However I don't know anything about seafood in tomato sauce.