Here it is—a very low effort narrative in honor of a very low effort, but absolutely delicious, Oven Roasted Tomato Sauce Recipe.
Say you have 10 minutes to prep, two hours to hang around (clean? trashy novels? a little Olympics?), and then another ten minutes to boil some pasta for dinner… Turns out you have time to make an out-of-this-world farm-to-table pasta sauce that will blow you away with it’s tomato-y goodness.
Here’s what you need:
Enough Roma Tomatoes, stemmed and cut in half, to completely cover the bottom of a jelly roll pan. (Romas are oblong, small and meaty. Ask at the market, and we’ll point them out to you. A jelly roll pan, by the way, is a cookie sheet with sides. You need the sides for this!)
An Onion, sliced
A handful of fresh basil, or a couple of pinches of dried herbs
2-3 cloves of garlic, peeled and smashed
Olive Oil, about ¼ cup
1 t. salt
1 t. sugar
black pepper to taste
Here’s what you do:
Preheat your oven to 375.
Cut the stems off of your tomatoes and then cut them in half again long ways. Lay them all out on your pan, skin side up. They should be in a single layer but they should fill the pan completely.
Top the tomatoes with the onion, basil, and garlic.
Drizzle the whole thing with olive oil, about a ¼ cup. (You really don’t need to measure.)
Sprinkle with salt, sugar, and black pepper.
Stick the pan in the oven for 2 hours. After the first hour, the veggies will be swimming in juice. Then, the juice will start to reduce to thick and sweet syrup. The tomatoes will collapse and blacken a little. The kitchen will smell like an Italian restaurant. Hungry people will come out of the woodwork.
Take the pan out the oven. Let everything cool just a little and then put the contents of the pan into your food processor. (The original recipe, which I copied from the Disney website a few years ago, called for a food mill, but we don’t have one, and we love the thick texture of the sauce that results when we just grind everything up.)
Process, and adjust the seasoning as needed.
Serve over warm pasta, on homemade pizza, or just with crackers.
(By the way, you can make this Oven Roasted Tomato Sauce Recipe in bulk and freeze it as well.)
See you at the Market!
