Pomodoro Sauce

I made my first dish for this blog last night.


And even managed to take pictures. 


As you may know, I try to spend Sunday afternoons preparing food for the week ahead. It helps me to both eat healthy and save money on eating out.


Yesterday was no exception. 


After a morning/early afternoon full of Mother's Day celebration, I was a little tired when I got home, but decided that I needed to get my act together and prepare food or I would spend another week regretting my choices.


Dirty Shirley had some grape tomatoes on the counter that were just about to reach the end of their useful life. I looked at them all weekend thinking that I needed to do something with them, and last night it hit me! I would make some sauce for my spaghetti squash. 


One quick call to Match.mom verified that I could actually use grape tomatoes for this purpose and I was set to go. 

You can see in this picture that the tomatoes are starting to get wrinkly. (Some had to just be thrown away, but most of them were good.)

I started out with three cloves of garlic and approximately 4 Tbsp. of olive oil. I happen to really like olive oil and garlic, if you don't, you may cut it down a little, but I can't promise it will be as good as mine.


Two other things to notice:


1. My beautiful Calphalon stainless steel pot. (Thanks Match!)
2. The little bit of green in the garlic. Dirty and I got crazy one day at Costco and bought the big bag of garlic thinking that we use a lot of it. Some is starting to sprout. I'm not concerned.

While the garlic was heating up, I sliced the tomatoes in half. I wanted them to be small enough to eat easily, but not so small that you forgot there were fresh tomatoes in the sauce. 


After I sliced them all, I put them in the pot to cook down a little. I stirred them every minute or so for about 10 minutes. 


While I was doing that, I headed out to the back porch to get some fresh basil off of our plant. 

You can't really see it in this picture, but something is getting into my basil plant and chewing little holes in the leaves. If I find that thing, it will suffer!


Either way, I have to give a little shout-out to Dirty right now. Before she moved in I couldn't keep anything alive. Seriously, my plants that are on drip system were struggling. But now, we have a thriving basil plant and a thriving tomato plant! Thanks, Dirty!

I washed the basil and gave it a rough chop. And after the tomatoes had cooked down to a saucy goodness, I threw the basil in, and stirred it around, and let it cook for about three minutes before turning the heat off.


I wish that this was a scratch and sniff photo because this sauce smelled DIVINE! It actually reminded me of college when I used to eat at the OG all of the time with Peach because IT worked there. Until one night...well, never mind, I'll tell you that story on the other blog some day.


Once I turned the heat off of the sauce, I started taking care of my spaghetti squash, which had been cooking for about an hour.

On the left you can see what it looks like after I've used two forks to get the "meat" off of the sides. On the right, after I've removed the seeds, but haven't separated it.

The finished product!


SO good!


I would add a little freshly grated salty Italian cheese. I chose Parmigiano-Reggiano. 


I also seem to remember that at some point when I was in college, Match.mom made a bunch of this sauce and froze it. So I think this is a possibility, but I can not say for sure.


Enjoy!