Roasted Tomato Vegetable Sauce

By Kathryn Washburn Breighner

We have lots of jars of tomatoes in our pantry since we canned 65 quarts of them last summer. So in our usual 'eat out of the pantry as much as possible' mode, we have been creative with the tomatoes. Marty cooked up this dish yesterday. He's not one for following recipes or logging what he's concocted but this one needs to remembered.  He is a spontaneous cook and knows how to blend the flavors and it shows in this dish.

What he did was saute some vegetables--onions, celery, garlic, carrots--add some seasonings and two quarts of tomatoes and then slow roasted them in the oven for several hours. He then pounded some pork tenderloin into thin slices and sauteed those in olive oil and placed the pork on top of pasta and then smothered with the sauce. Great stuff!

3 medium onions, chopped
2 garlic cloves, minced
4 celery stalks, chopped
3 carrots, chopped
3 T olive oil
2 qts  canned tomatoes
1 t dried basil
1 t oregano
salt and pepper to taste

Saute the vegetables in olive oil until they begin to soften. Add the tomatoes and spices. Cover and bake in a 325 degree oven for 2 hours.

This makes a big pot of sauce. So for Day 2, I used the leftover sauce in a meat loaf. To 1 lb. of ground beef, I added 1 chopped onion, 1 egg, 3/4 c panko bread crumbs, and 2/3 c of roasted tomato vegetable sauce. I blended the mixture and packed tightly into a bread pan, topped with 1/3 c of sauce and baked for 45 min at 350 degrees.