Home grown, baby!

Our tomato crop is starting to come in! Yesterday, I went out to water the Earth Boxes and picked about 10 ripe beauties. And there are plenty more on the vines, so pretty soon I'll need to start thinking of new and exciting ways to use tomatoes.

Today, I made marinara sauce. I have a great recipe, from an Italian family in a previous ward. It's delicious! I just substituted the crushed tomatoes for our own tomatoes, which I pureed in the food pro. It worked like a charm!

Daniel was my little helper throughout the process. He was anxious to see what I was doing, so I let him pull up a chair to have a closer look.

Here's Danny, stirring our pot of sauce!

Now, if I were really serious, I would have made this in bulk and canned the sauce for food storage. But I guess I'm not that serious yet. I only made enough for about two jars, so I just poured it in and put it in the refrigerator. Here's my finished product:


Sidenote: when I first met Brandon, I quickly came to realize how serious his family was about gardening. One of the first times I ate dinner with his family, I recall my father-in-law foregoing dessert, opting instead to eat a green bell pepper from his garden. In all fairness, there was a time in Brandon's youth when they grew a fantastic garden and ate from it throughout the summer, and then canned all kinds of produce for year-round use. The children helped out - whether they wanted to or not - and there is a lot of family pride in the experience, looking back. If you don't believe me, just ask them about gardening. I dare you.

Anyway, tonight we had homemade marinara sauce with pasta for dinner, made with tomatoes from our mini-garden, and it was delicious. But don't you think everything tastes better from your own garden?

It's true! Just ask a Livingston.