September 2013: Making Spaghetti Sauce...

One of the great things of living in small town USA is that a LOT of people garden and share fresh vegetables and bring over jars of homemade applesauce and pickles just to say hello (yes, we have gotten all of these things!). Well, the other week, a lady from my church brought us a whole box of yellow tomatoes and a head of cabbage! We ended up tossing the cabbage because we couldn't eat it before it went bad, but I knew I had to do something with the tomatoes!! There's so many possibilities of things to make with fresh tomatoes.

So, I decided to jump right in to small town living (not sure what it has to do with actually living in a small town, but I just feel like it seems right that we make all our own food from fresh ingredients!) and I had my first attempt at making my very own spaghetti sauce!

My little helper helped me gather the tomatoes and wash all the dirt off of them..

And I cut them and started to cook them (mashing them as they cooked)...lookin' good!!

My little helper of course had to taste test every once in awhile...

And I was so excited that the spaghetti sauce tasted pretty good!!!! To thicken it up a bit, I decided to put a little bit of corn starch into the tomato mixture, and I admit, it got a little thick, but the taste was still good...

Here's the true test...

But what I didn't know about corn starch is that it just keeps getting thicker and thicker as it sits and simmers!! So by the time I got my spaghetti and was ready to eat it, the sauce was so thick and jelly-like that it was NASTY!!!! I definitely learned my lesson about corn starch (get rid of that stuff!) and I consider my first attempt at making homemade spaghetti sauce a big. fat. fail. It was so bad that I couldn't even finish my dinner, and after tossing it in the garbage, I ended up with a peanut butter sandwich instead.

Ugh. All that work for nothing:). Maybe it will take me a little bit longer than I had hoped to get this small town living thing down...