Fresh Tomato Sauce

I haven't posted any recipes lately and just in case anyone uses them, I want to give two of my favorites this summer. We will start with Fresh Tomato Sauce. This was originally from Smitten Kitchen but I tweaked it a little.

Fresh Tomato Sauce
Serves 3

Notes
This took me awhile to perfect but I finally did it. The trick is in the skin of the tomato. Tomatoes have wonderful flavor in the skin and this is lost when you straight up puree tomatoes as you are supposed to only get the middle but, I figured out how to use both....
First things first, you still will need the tomato puree which means you have to get the good stuff out of the tomatoes. The first thing I tried in order to puree was my sauce maker. It worked great. Just cut the tomatoes and turn. But...then it started not turning correctly and I got frustrated so I had to think of something else. I ended up taking my tomatoes, cutting them in half and squeezing them as hard as I could. Seriously. I got the stuff I wanted. You do get some seeds but that really is no big deal, you don't notice it in the final product. Make sure you save the skins somewhere, you are going to use those in this recipe too.

Ingredients
- about 6 to 10 medium to large sized tomatoes
- 3T olive oil
- small onion chopped
- 3 cloves of garlic halved
- 1/2 carrot chopped
- 1/2 stalk of celery chopped
- salt
-pepper
- italian seasoning or dried basil

Method
1) Preheat oven to 400.
2) Prepare that tomato puree by squeezing the shit (literally) out of your tomatoes. Seeds are fine but you want to keep the skin. If some of the thick innards get in your puree, that is good, you just don't want all of them.
3) Put the skin of the tomatoes on a baking pan with some salt and pepper and when the oven is ready, let those roast for 20 - 30min (we will add them later)
4) Put your olive oil in a sauce pan and add the onion, celery, and carrots. Cook until soft, about 10 min.
5) Add the garlic, salt, pepper, and italian/basil seasoning. Cook for 3 more min.
6) Put your pan fried veggie mix in a food processor and chop until you get the consistency you want. (I like mine a bit chunky.)
7) Put your squeezed tomato puree and processed veggies in the saucepan and simmer for a good 30 - 45 min.
8) While your sauce is cooking, get out those roasted tomatoes and puree in the food processor, add it to the sauce mixture on the stove.
9) If 30 - 45 min rolls by and the sauce mix is too thin for you, put 2t of cornstarch and about 3 - 4t of water in a little bowl and mix well. Pour the cornstarch mix in the sauce and stir until thicker. You can do this again if you want it thicker.

This recipe has the basics but is a personal experimental thing taste-wise and ingredient-wise. Good luck. It tastes GREAT on top of pasta!