Last week when I went to do my shopping at K+N in Birkenhead (top veg shop!) I saw they had a couple of crates of English tomatoes for sale at £2.99 each. £2.99!! The box was over 5kg! So that’s less than 60p per kg or about £1 less per kg than normal price. I knew it was good, but I’d never normally get through so many before they went squidgy.  And then a flash of inspiration, I remembered seeing Hugh making tomato sauce for the year from his home grown yearly glut and decided this was my chance to do the same (shame they weren’t home grown though).

This is really good. K+N probably buy from wholesale market in Liverpool, which I assume works a bit like a normal market, only bigger. Often at the end of the day you’ll get people practically giving things away, and they pass this on to their customers. Reminds me of I was walking through Kirkgate Market in Leeds a couple of weeks ago and a guy was shouting “Bag of bananas a pound! As many bananas as you can fit in a carrier bag a pound!” He had a hoard of ladies surrounding him grabbing at bananas and stuffing them into bags! So funny. I love the atmosphere in a market. Everyone shouting, people everywhere, so much going on. Imagine the staff of Tesco stood at the end of the aisle passionately trying to get you to buy their over priced ready meals and toilet fresheners. Nah, never going to happen really is it?

Obviously the bananas were unlikely to be fair trade nor would they or my tomatoes have been organic, but there is something about buying produce directly from a person with their own shop or stall that to some extent counterbalances these concerns. Although the ideal would be to shop by these principles all the time, it is not always practical, or as much fun! I remember being told as a kid “Don’t cut your nose off to spite your face”  more often than I imagine could have been necessary and it has obviously sunk in. I wonder why people kept saying this to me? What was I up to? Must have been up to no good anyway. Maybe I just remember it vividly as it’s really quite a gruesome thing to be saying to a small child. I was probably traumatised. Anyway what I’m trying to say is there is a lot to worry about when choosing what food to buy (or at least I find there is, more and more all the time) and you’d drive yourself (and other people) crazy and be likely to burn out and give up if you tried to stick rigidly to your principles all the time.

Well that went off on a bit of a tangent I wasn’t expecting! Back to what I was saying. So I’d seen Hugh making tomato sauce and decided I’d do the same. The result was fantastic! Such a sweet rich sauce! The 5kg of tomatoes converted into about 2.5 litres of tomato sauce which I now have handily stashed away in the freezer for any recipe calling for a tomato based sauce. Actually it didn’t all make it to the freezer, we had some just as it was on pasta (YUM!) and another portion was used in a sweet potato, marrow and lentil stew which we had with dumplings (more about these another time – so good they deserve their own post!).

The sauce was so simple to make, I hardly needed to add anything to the tomatoes as the roasting process really brought out the flavours. When I make tomato sauce for pasta with chopped tinned tomatoes I’d normally add a bit of sugar and lemon juice, but after the roasting these really didn’t need it, they were delicious as they were. I also decided not to add any herbs as that way I could decide when I used the sauce in later recipes what should go in then. But if you decide to go for herbs from the start you can sprinkle them over while roasting the tomatoes. You could also miss the onions out if you fancied thinking about them later too.

Rich Roast Tomato Sauce

• tomatoes
• garlic
• onions
• black olives, roughly chopped
• olive oil
• balsamic vinegar
• S+P

1. Put out all the tomatoes you have on baking trays and splash over olive oil, balsamic and dot around big chunks or whole pieces of garlic, how many will vary to taste, I used 10 (!) or so with my 5kg of tomatoes. If in doubt put more than you think, the flavour of the garlic mellows with roasting and the whole cloves probably won’t end up in the final sauce anyway so don’t panic. Sprinkle with lots of S+P.
2. Pop the tomatoes in the oven at a medium heat and cook until they are breaking down and starting to brown in places, will be about 40 minutes or so.
3. Meanwhile finely chop some onions (I used 2 normal and 1 red) and sweat the gently with a little oil in a very large covered pan.
4. When the tomatoes are ready press through a seive (if you don’t want any seeds in the sauce) or colander with smallish holes (if you don’t mind a few seeds and want to do this bit quicker) You’ll need to stir round in the colander pressing it against the edges to get all the juice out and eventually will just be left with the skins, and maybe some chunks of garlic which you then discard.
5. Pour the tomato sauce into the pan with the onions, add the olives and leave to cook through for at least ten minutes. Season with S+P.
6. That’s it! Now just eat it as it is, or leave to cool and then bag up to go in the freezer in separate portion sized containers. Hurrah!

Here’s the garlic I put in. Andy thought I’d gone crazy and insisted on taking a photo.