So, cartoonist mentioned that if she was going to invite her friends over, we should have pizza.
I paused on that thought, and she had the same thought at the same time. “We need to make that from scratch too.” she said.
So, where to start. I found a good gluten-free recipe for the crust, and then we started talking about what you put on a pizza.
Tomato sauce came up, along with cheese. The cheese, I am not ready to make yet. I am only just getting the hang of making yogurt, of which I need to make more of, by the way, but the tomato sauce, I knew I could make. The first thing I needed to do was to find a recipe for stewing tomatoes, since that is one of the main ingredients in the sauce. I have fond memories of made from scratch tomato sausce, that would take several hours to make. It was so good, and my mother very rarely had the time. It was a recipe from my paternal grandmother, and I don’t think she ever wrote it down, and it was such a pain for my mother to do, that we only had it a few times, but oh, was it good.
I went to my Italian recipe book, but all it said was to open a can of stewed tomatoes, as did most of the recipes in most of the books I had. Next, I hit the internet, and after much searching found a crock-pot version of the sauce. It was in about.com, and here it is, which what we changed:
- 6 to 8 ripe tomatoes (we did 7)
- 2 tablespoons margarine (we used butter)
- 1 medium onion, thinly sliced (well, I sliced it, not sure how thin it was)
- 3/4 cup chopped celery (didn’t have, so left out)
- 1/2 cup chopped green pepper (had a red one, so chopped that up)
- 3 tablespoons of sugar, more or less (so I did about 3 tablespoons of sugar, raw sugar)
- 1 small bay leaf (bay leaves were old, so added two)
- 1 teaspoon of salt (sprinkled a pinch)
- 1/8 teaspoon of pepper (ground a few turns)
Tomatoes in Crock pot
The recipe said to core the tomatoes, place in boiling water, for 20 seconds then in ice water to get the peel off. We decided we didn’t mind the peel, so skipped that step. After that, it said to put everything in the crock pot and cook for 8 hours, and that is what it is doing right now. It smells so good, no exactly the way I remember it smelling, but good, none the less. Hopefully this part will not fail, and we can move on from there to the next step, the pizza dough, which we shall make tomorrow.
