Simple Homemade Tomato Sauce

I promised you some great recipes this week in my post yesterday and here is the first one! This tomato sauce is extremely simple, healthy and delicious. It's perfect to use on pizza, pasta or any other recipe that calls for tomato sauce.

It's always so easy to buy a jar of tomato sauce in the grocery store, but you'd be surprised at how easy it really is to just make your own. I used some canned tomatoes because I didn't buy enough fresh ones at the farmer's market to make sauce from all fresh tomatoes, but you can definitely use all fresh tomatoes for this recipe.

By making your own tomato sauce you can easily control the ingredients that go into it. No sugar or strange ingredients go into homemade tomato sauce and that alone makes it so much healthier for you and your family to enjoy. I also like using tomatoes that are grown locally and organically to remove any chemicals or pesticides from the equation.

Once you make your own tomato sauce, you'll never see the need to buy a jar from the store again. I am looking forward to enjoying my tomato sauce throughout this week in a few different recipes and I hope you will soon do the same with your batch of homemade sauce. Enjoy!

Simple Homemade Tomato Sauce:

1 tablespoon olive oil

1 shallot, minced

3 garlic cloves, minced

3-4 fresh plum tomatoes, chopped

1 (28 oz) can whole tomatoes

1 tablespoon tomato paste

1 tablespoon dried Italian herbs

2 bay leaves

salt and pepper, to taste

1. Heat the olive oil in a large saucepan over medium high heat. Add in the shallot and garlic and cook for about 3 minutes. Stir in the tomato paste, dried herbs, plum tomatoes and can of tomatoes (liquid and all).
2. Let simmer for about 10 minutes. Transfer the mixture to a food processor and blend until the tomatoes are broken up, but there are still some small chunks. Return to the pot and stir in the bay leaves, salt and pepper. Let simmer for 30 minutes to 1 hour. Remove the bay leaves and let cool completely. Store in an air tight container in the refrigerator.