Our family is definitely a pasta family. Weather it is spaghetti, ravioli, lasagna, or baked ziti, we all love pasta! Canning plain tomatoes and salsa started with my great-grandparents, but a few years ago my husband and I tried canning our own spaghetti sauce. It has now become a family favorite! While you can alter the recipe to adhere to your preferred taste, this is what we generally do. Disclaimer: every batch is a little bit different, but that is part of the fun!
Here’s how we turn these, straight from our garden……
To these, ready to be stored and enjoyed……
First we clean and blanch the tomatoes in a boiling pot of water on the stove. You can tell when they are ready when the skin has broke, like in the picture to the right. If you boil them too long, they will get mushy and are harder to peel and work with. Then we peel and core the tomatoes. *Homesteader tip: you can feed the cores to the chickens!*
Next, add the tomatoes to a large pot or bowl and use an immersion blender to make the tomatoes into sauce. We always add a few cans of tomato paste to speed up the process. Without tomatoes paste, it takes a long time (hours and hours and hours) for the sauce to thicken enough. We usually add the paste before using the immersion blender because it mixes it in more quickly. This is the immersion blender we use and love it! https://amzn.to/4mcXPGF
Next we add all of the seasonings and vegetables. We add one to two diced onions depending on the amount of tomatoes. My husband and I loving adding green peppers and mushrooms. However, not everyone loves them, so we make a few batches without. The must haves are garlic (either minced or powder), brown sugar, salt, pepper, Italian seasoning, parsley, basil, and oregano. Sometimes we add bay leaves, rosemary, onion powder, thyme, or crushed red pepper, it just depends what we have in the garden and the cabinet.
Once everything is added and the tomatoes are mushed, we boil the sauce and stir often until it is as thick as we want. Once it as the desired thickness we can them!
I will post more info on how we can in general, but this is the process we use for making sauce! Let me know what you like in yours!
Her Real Journey 
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