Sunday, October 26, 2008

Pizza Sauce from Fresh Tomatoes

I had a bunch of local Roma tomatoes at the end of the harvest season and needed to do something with them. I decided to make homemade pizza sauce. I used the olive oil dough recipe from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day for the pizza dough, which was fabulous and really easy. I found this recipe for the sauce - it was actually kind of hard to find a recipe that did not call for canned tomatoes or tomato puree. I wanted to find a recipe that I could use when we live overseas, where I can't just run over to Walmart for a can of tomatoes.

This sauce was great and pretty easy to make. I used dried oregano because that's all I had, fresh basil from our patio garden, and added salt and pepper to taste at the end. I seeded the tomatoes, but did not bother peeling them, which I liked about this recipe. I used my immersion blender to puree it at the end. My husband was very impressed that you can make good pizza sauce from scratch (goodbye, Walmart pizza sauce! At least when we have good, fresh tomatoes).

Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Cranberry-Apple Crisp

My coworker brought in a bucket of apples from her yard a few weeks back. Never one to turn down free local produce, I took a bunch of apples home and figured I would find a use for them. We went to a potluck a few days later so I made this crisp, which was delicious. I still had a bag of cranberries from last Thanksgiving in my freezer, so this was a perfect recipe to use those up.

I made a few adjustments based on reviewer's recommendations - I doubled the topping, halved the cranberries, and doubled the apples. I also added a teaspoon of cinnamon to the topping mixture, and used water instead of cider since I didn't have any cider on hand.

This was delicious. I thought doubling the topping was a little much, though my topping-loving husband thought it was just perfect. Doubling the topping also made it a little too sweet for my taste. I think next time I would use 1 1/2 times the topping rather than doubling it. Other than that, I thought this was excellent, and it went really well with whipped topping or vanilla ice cream.