The best homemade pasta sauce

Made from freshly picked tomatoes, basil, simple herbs and spices, and a few other ingredients, this sauce is wonderful! It turned out nice and thick, with a great flavor :) ingredients:

15-20 lbs of tomatoes (I used Roma from the garden)

2 large white onions, diced

12 basil leaves, chopped 

10 cloves of garlic, chopped

2 tsp. dried oregano

2 bay leavs

3 star anise

2 tsp. salt

1 tsp. black pepper

4 cans of tomato paste with herbs (6 oz)

2 cans of tomato sauce (29 oz)

Start off by blanching, peeling and seeding your tomatoes. This is the long part, so buckle up and enjoy!

Add all of those to a large stock pot, along with your herbs: Chop up your onion, Garlic and basil and add to the stock pot.

Add everything but the sauce and paste and boil, stirring frequently.

Your tomatoes will start to break up at they boil. If they are a little too chunky, you can mash them up with a potato masher. I prefer a thicker sauce, so I slipped this step. 

Simmer for 3-5 hours and then slowly add I'm the sauce and paste. Do not. Forget to stir! Simmer for about an hour and add to sterilized pint sized mason jar. Add a tablespoon of bottled lemon juice per jar to preserve the sauce and prevent discoloring. If preserving in quart sizes jars, add two tablespoons of lemon juice. This sauce turned out pretty thick, which we wanted so we are using pint sized jars, we feel that one jar will be more than enough for a meal. We usually use about 1/4 of a jar for each spaghetti meal we make! I usually warm up the dab of sauce with some plain tomato sauce. This recipe uses so much tomato paste that we can get about 4 meals out of each jar. If you want, you can freeze 1/4-1/2 cup portions of the sauce to use when your ready! I like to use my food saver and freeze 1/2 portions, lay nice and flat to freeze and when we want to use it, I take it out the day we are having spaghetti and put in the fridge or take out while Im boiling the water for the noodles and pale it in a bowl with warm water to thaw out. Cook in a sauce pan with water or plain tomato sauce.  There you have it! Condensed pasta sauce ;)