Tomatoes - from Garden to Marinara Sauce

We grew lots of tomatoes this summer.  One of the plants we grew were Roma tomatoes.  These are the long tomatoes used for Italian sauces.  We kept harvesting them until I had enough for a pot of marinara sauce.   I had 4 1/2 lbs of these tomatoes to make the sauce.

Earlier this year I purchased a Juicemate at a garage sale.  This is a juicer type of machine that is hand operated (no motor).  It looked like fun, and it actually worked very well.  Bill and I worked together to create the tomato puree which was the base for the marinara sauce.

I sliced the tomatoes, and Bill turned the handle to crush the tomatoes into a puree.  We used the pumpkin sieve to do this because we did not want tomato juice.  We wanted a puree.  Using the pumpkin sieve allowed the seeds to go into the puree.   It was fun to see the skin come out one side of the machine, and the puree come out the other.  When we were done we had about 2 quarts of tomato sauce/puree.  It was thinner than tomato paste and thicker than tomato juice.

 I then sauteed two chopped onions and chopped garlic, added the tomato puree, added one cup of chopped basil and cooked over a medium heat with no lid for 45 minutes.  At that point I added some sugar, salt and pepper to taste.  Mmm! Good!

This, a salad, and some garlic bread made a yummy dinner last night.