Buon Appetito! Homemade Roasted Garlic Marinara and Limoncello

We went to the Mennonite market with a friend and their canning tomatoes were a really great price $14/box. I wasn’t going to have time to work with them then, but I went back later and bought a box of them to make sauce out of because we are COMPLETELY out of the sauce I made last year. This is how I make my roasted garlic marinara–thanks to the New York Times recipe!

First I wash all my tomatoes and quarter them if they’re big and halve them if they’re smaller. I add chopped or sliced onion (I had chopped onion in the fridge that I needed to use up.) I also add about 1/2 cup of whole garlic cloves (I buy the peeled ones at Aldi.)

Then I add a few tablespoons of olive oil. I like this one from Costco.

Then I stir everything together until all the vegetables are well coated.

Then I spread them on a greased rimmed baking tray and roast them at 400 degrees for about 30 to 40 minutes, until they look like this:

For a box of tomatoes, I roasted 7 trays of vegetables. Once they have cooled, I sent them through the food mill to remove the skins and seeds. I use an OXO brand food mill on the finest cone. By the time I got to this step, it was already late, so I started the next step the following morning.

I went out to the garden and picked a GIANT bunch of basil. I washed it and put it in my largest stock pot–stems and all.

Then I poured my sauce over the basil.

I brought this up to a simmer and let it cook for about an hour. Then I strained out the basil leaves and then I canned the sauce according to the Ball Blue Book. You can go to this post to see the full instructions: https://cathyathomeontheriver.com/2023/08/25/roasted-garlic-marinara/↗

This made exactly one canner load (7 quarts) of sauce. I love it when things work out that way.

Homemade Limoncello

If you’ve been following along for a while, you’ll remember that I made Meyer Lemon Limoncello to give as gifts at the holidays. Well, I bought lemons (huge ones) for the holiday weekend and ended up not using them, so, since I am out of limoncello and we have friends coming for the upcoming weekend who love it, I decided to make a batch.

Ingredients:

1 liter pure grain alcohol

9 large lemons

4 1/2 cups sugar

6 3/4 cups water

Wash the lemons thoroughly with soapy water and rinse. Using a vegetable peeler, remove the skin from all the lemons. Place the lemon zest in the jar of a large blender.

Add the alcohol to the jar and process until the zest is chopped into small pieces.

Pour all of this into a half gallon jar.

Place this in a dark place and shake 1 time per day for five days.

Strain the mixture with a fine mesh sieve and pour it back into the jar (rinse it out first to ensure no strain pieces of zest end up in the finished product.)

In the meantime, cook 3 1/2 cups of water and sugar until the sugar is completely dissolved and remove from heat. Add the remaining 3 1/4 cups of water (use really cold water to bring the temperature down as quickly as possible.)

Once the simple syrup is cooled to room temperature, pour the alcohol into the pot and stir to combine. Decant into bottles and store in the refrigerator. This will keep for 1 year.