AT THE WATER’S EDGE:

I’m not yet to the point of growing enough in my garden to make a whole meal out of only home-grown foods, but I do love it when I can incorporate veggies from my garden as a main part of my dinner.  Last week I tried something new: homemade spaghetti sauce.  For some reason, I was always under the impression that I needed bushels of tomatoes if I was going to make any significant quantity of sauce.  I had about 10 tomatoes, but some of them were quite small.  Most of them ripened on the same day, and it was only a couple days before we were leaving for the weekend.  I wasn’t sure I’d have time to get through all the tomatoes before they went bad, and I had such a small crop this year that I didn’t want to waste any.  I had done slow roasted tomatoes last year, but it was a lot of work.  I wanted something easier.  So, I decided to look up a spaghetti sauce recipe, just to see what it took.  Lo and behold, I had everything I needed on hand to make my own spaghetti sauce–even tomato paste…why I had that, I have no idea! But, boy am I glad!  I wasn’t sure how much sauce I would end up with, but decided to give it a try anyways.  Here’s the basic recipe that I worked from.

There was something a little bit different about my tomatoes, though.  Most of them were orange!  I had purchased some tomato plants from a roadside stand this spring, and didn’t really know what kind of tomatoes they were.  Surprise!  They actually resembled miniature pumpkins.  

The taste is pretty much like any other tomato, but I think the orange and yellow ones generally have a lower acidity.  While I was making my sauce, it looked rather funny because it was not at all the color of typical spaghetti sauce.  Once I added in the tomato paste, the sauce turned more reddish, though.  I ended up with enough sauce for about 5 small batches of spaghetti.  I divided it all up into containers and froze most of it, but left one container in the fridge—for tonight!

Since I didn’t have time to actually eat the spaghetti sauce last week, I was greatly anticipating trying it tonight.  I perhaps went a little heavy on the noodles, but I kind of like it that way.  The sauce was very light, but good tasting!  I added some fresh ground pepper like I normally do, but otherwise I didn’t have to add anything to it.  To make things even better, dinner tonight was served with some extra garlic dill twists that I made a while back AND a salad with fresh picked lettuce.  That’s right.  Lettuce is a cool weather crop, and I have an abundant fall crop coming in from my “lettuce pot” on my deck.  There are mixed leaf lettuces growing – so I picked some of that and tossed it with some dried berries, sunflower seeds and a quick homemade dressing (olive oil, red wine vinegar, salt, pepper, Italian seasoning).  And that was our dinner tonight.