Lazy-ish Weekend

I had plans for the weekend: go to the Farmers Market to get winter garden starts and some produce for preserving throughout next week. That didn’t happen. I was tired once Friday arrived, no less tired when I got up on Saturday, so I just had a rest day.

Today, though, I knew I had to accomplish one particular project: make pizza sauce.

When I planted cherry tomatoes this Spring, my intention was to dehydrate them and turn most of them into tomato powder. A few weeks ago, though, I saw a You Tube video from Living Traditions Homestead where Sarah was making pizza sauce from cherry tomatoes.

One of the nebulous thoughts in the back of my mind has been that I’d like to learn how to make pizza in a cast iron skillet. Well, this sauce recipe would get me one step closer to accomplishing that. I ordered the book with the recipe, and it arrived while I was on vacation.

In the week since my return to the homestead, I harvested more than the 12 cups of cherry tomatoes needed for the recipe. The refrigerator was overflowing with them!

Roasted Cherry Tomato Pizza Sauce

(from Freeze Fresh by Crystal Schmidt)

I started by washing and cutting the tomatoes in half.

Then I put them on face-up cookie sheets and spritzed them with olive oil. Popped them into the pre-heated 350-degree oven and let them roast for 90 minutes.

You roast them to reduce the amount of water in the tomatoes. This will help you have a thick sauce, not a runny sauce.

I forgot to rotate the trays halfway through as the recipe instructed. It wasn’t a disaster but there were a few pieces so charred I put them in the chicken treat dish. I need to highlight that step in the recipe. Another thing to note is that, while I did toss the tomatoes with the olive oil to help them not stick and used non-stick foil — they stuck. So, I need to actually spritz the foil with oil, too.

The next step was to put the roasted tomatoes in the blender, add the seasonings, and run it until it’s smooth. Just look at how thick this sauce is:

I got four and a half cups of sauce in the freezer. One cup is enough for two 10-inch pizzas.

Next step: find an easy dough recipe to use in a cast iron skillet.