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I told you the other day that I was able to pick up some super cheap vegetables at a local farm.
I ended up making my mom’s homemade spaghetti sauce.. FOUR crock pots worth!
I called for some back-up (and extra crock pots). My friend Amy showed up yesterday with 2 crock pots. We worked for almost 3 hours peeling, chopping and preparing.
The recipe for 1 batch (we made 6 batches):
- 8-10 whole tomatoes, peeled (we also quartered them, but you could leave them whole for an even chunkier sauce)
- 18 oz tomato paste
- 1 onion, chopped
- 1 green pepper, chopped
- Italian seasoning (to taste)
- sugar (to taste)
- 1 bay leaf
- we also added 1/2-1 eggplant (finely chopped) to each batch!
Directions: Combine all ingredients in crock pot. Cook on low for 6-8 hours, stirring occasionally. Remove bay leaf before serving.
Our price breakdown:
- Case of tomatoes – $5 (!)
- Tomato paste – $5
- Green peppers, onions, eggplant – $4
- Bay leaf, sugar, Italian seasoning – already had these!
$16 total
The sauce in all of it’s simmery, chunky glory:
The sauce cooked for about 8 hours on low… and I stirred it every hour or so…
When the sauce was finished, I portioned the sauce into ziploc freezer bags. I put 2-3 cups of sauce (a meal’s worth for our fam) into each bag.
Using the bags helped to cut down on freezer space.
We piled the bags into various baking dishes and stuck them in the freezer.
After the sauce froze, I was able to take the bags out of the dishes and stack them any which way they would fit in our freezers (which are rather loaded full of FREE Eggos at the moment!).
The sauce can be defrosted easily- simply pull it out of the freezer and let it defrost in the refrigerator or heat it up in a sauce pan.
We ended up with about 31 bags of sauce for $14 worth of fresh, locally grown ingredients. That comes out to $.45/bag.
This was a great opportunity to stock up on homemade sauce, no added preservatives, that will probably last us about 6 months.
p.s. Did I mention it’s DELICIOUS?!
Thanks for the step by step guide. I’ve have been looking for a recipe to make homemade tomato sauce for all the tomatoes I’m getting from my garden. And I was debating on learning to can them or freeze them. Your method seems perfect for me. Thanks again.
You’re welcome- enjoy!