I grew up on this pizza sauce and I love it more than any other I have tried.  I know it may be too late for some of you to get good, ripe tomatoes right now, but this recipe will be around if you want to try it next year.

Please note:  We’re not Italian and I may not be telling you the proper way that you feel things should be done when one is making pizza sauce (like when to add spices, which spices to use, etc.). I’m just telling you the way we make it.  And yes, that is the word margarine that you see in the ingredient list.  I actually buy it special just for this recipe.

First, you put a pot of water on the stove and wait for it to boil (yeah, that sure is fun). Normal people blanch (shout-out to my favorite slutty Golden Girl) their tomatoes by waiting for the water to boil and putting the tomatoes in the water one at a time.  I have no idea if my mother did this or not.  I was busy doing something else.  Ahem.

When the skin on the tomato starts to split you take them out of the water with a slotted spoon. Please note Shirley’s blurry slotted spoon at the top of this picture.

And then you put (omg, plunge!) them in cold water. And seriously, you can add ice to the water to make this process work better for you, but my mother has no patience. She plops them in the water and immediately starts peeling the skin off of them. While they’re still fucking hot. And then she gets bitchy and yells at me when I’m taking too long trying to get a semi-decent picture.  Which I didn’t get because she makes me nervous with the bitching.  Vicious cycle.  I am abused.  Heh.

Remove the core/stem/whatever you want to call it part of the tomato and peel off the skin. My mom tosses them in a colander as soon as she does this.

Note: If you need more serious instruction on blanching tomatoes, you might want to try this site.

Put all of the skinned tomatoes back into a large pot and let it simmer on medium heat until they cook down. You can help them along by smashing/smooshing them with a spoon.

This is what it looks like at the beginning of cooking them down.

Cauldron.  Hair of dog.  Eye of newt.  Make this shit go KaPOOT!

I start adding the ingredients/seasonings after it’s cooked down a bit. And then we let it cook a while longer until we get the sauce as thick as we like it. Your kitchen will smell great.

We do half-pint and pint jars (we average about 10 pint jars). Or we put it in Ziploc bags and freeze it flat.