Sarah's Homemade Tomato Sauce

In her own words, Sarah describes the process for her tomato sauce.  When TR and I made this, we didn't add the ground beef, simply because we didn't have it thawed out in time.  ;)  I can definitely see doing this in the future and doubling, even tripling the recipe (it looks intimidating, but honestly it's quite easy) and canning the sauce for use later.

Ingredients:
3/4 pound sweet Italian sausage
3/4 pound lean ground beef
1/2 cup minced onion
8-10 tomatoes, med-large in size
1 can tomato paste
4 tablespoons olive oil
2 tablespoons white sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons dried basil
1/2 teaspoon fennel seed
1 teaspoon Italian seasoning
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper

Preparing tomatoes:
In a pot of boiling water, put 2-3 whole tomatoes at time. Boil until you see the skin split and start to peel. Transfer tomatoes from boiling water to ice water. Repeat for all tomatoes. Pull tomatoes out of ice water and peel skin off and cut out the core. The skins should slide right off very easily. Take the seeds out of the tomatoes by squeezing or using your fingers to dig out the seeds. Put seedless tomatoes into blender and blend to desired smoothness or chunkiness. I usually purify most and then leave 4 tomatoes or so chunkier.

Sauce Directions:
In a large pot or Dutch oven over medium heat, cook the sausage, beef, onion, and garlic until well browned; drain fat. Stir in blended tomatoes and tomato paste. Mix in sugar and season with basil, fennel seed, Italian seasoning, salt, and pepper. Reduce heat to low, cover, and simmer 1 1/2 hours, stirring occasionally. (This makes a lot of sauce. For my family it's at least 2-3 meals worth of sauce. I take out 4 cups at a time after it's cooled and bag it and freeze it. 4 cups = 1 jar of spaghetti sauce.)

Herbs - I use what's on hand. I used mostly fresh this time, just chopped up thyme, oregano, basil and Italian parsley. I then added dried fennel seed, dried oregano and dried basil as well, plus the salt and pepper.

Olive Oil - I just did 4 swirls of the pan or so (so I guessed about 4 tbsp.). You can add more or none. This was the first time I added it.

Meat - You don't have to even add meat, but I think it adds to the flavor. This time I used nitrate-free already cooked Italian sausage. I just cut it into tiny cubes and added it with the hamburger. In the past, I've used ground turkey sweet Italian sausage. I would cut the casing and just add the inside and it mixes with the beef. I prefer this method so it's all uniform and cooks better. You could also add ground pork, ground steak or whatever your family likes.

Some recipes call for water. Every time I've added water, it gets way too runny. Probably because it's fresh tomatoes. Don't add water!! You might even want to add another can or two of tomato paste to thicken it up if you like a thicker sauce. Also, if you plan to freeze it, that can water it down, so when I go to heat it up again after it's frozen, I'll sometimes add a can of paste.

It seems like a lot of steps, but it's actually quite easy! And once you do it once it's even easier!! Enjoy!!