My Most Comforting Comfort Food

I have always been a pasta lover.  I could eat pasta with every meal, serious!  Spaghetti is my most comforting comfort meal.  After a really long day, or if I'm getting home from traveling, all I want to do is boil up some noodles and pour some delicious tomato sauce over the top.  While jarred pasta sauce is fine and dandy, a home-made sauce is always better.

This recipe is my absolute fave!  It's super easy to make, even easier to eat.  All of you Weight Watchers fans... 1 serving is only 2 points!  You'll be absolutely amazed at the deep, rich flavor of this sauce, achieved by using only 3 simple ingredients: tomatoes, garlic, and olive oil.  Don't be intimidated by the large amount of garlic in this recipe.  It really mellows out and gets deliciously sweet after simmering with the tomatoes for an hour. Just make sure your dinner-mates eat it too and no one will notice the garlic breath.  (FYI, if you didn't know: a bulb of garlic is the whole thing, a clove is just one piece off the the bulb.)

      Garlic Tomato Sauce (makes 3 cups, enough for 1 lb pasta, 4 servings)
    

     - 2 lbs Fresh Roma Tomatoes (about 16)
     - 2 Bulbs of Garlic
     - 3/4 Tablespoon Olive Oil

1. Peel each clove of garlic.  This is made super easy by laying the flat side of the blade of a chef's knife over the top of the garlic clove and hitting it with the heel of your hand.  You should end up with 24-30 cloves of garlic.  Don't bother chopping up the garlic at this point.  
2. To peel the tomatoes easily, bring a large stock pot of water to a boil.  Slit an X in the bottom of each tomato and carefully put them into the boiling water.  After about 30 seconds, you should notice the skins starting to peel up where the X was cut.  Take the tomatoes out of the water as soon as you notice this.  Quickly put them into a large bowl of ice water to keep them from continuing to cook.  Once the tomatoes are cool enough to handle, the skins should easily slide off.
3. Heat the olive oil over medium heat in a medium-sized stock pot and saute the garlic just long enough until you start to smell it.  Add the tomatoes and adjust the heat so the whole pot starts to simmer.  Cover and simmer for 1 hour.  Stirring every now and then to help the tomatoes break up.  Once the sauce has cooked for 1 hour, remove from heat and let sit for 20 minutes or until the sauce is cooled a little.  
4. If you have an immersion blender, use it to completely puree the sauce.  If you don't have an immersion blender, transfer the sauce a little a time to a standing blender and puree.  Remember to take the plastic center out of the lid of the blender to make sure the heat of the sauce doesn't blow the lid off.  Cover the whole with a dish towel to keep the sauce from splattering everywhere.
5. Serve hot!

This sauce freezes really, really well.  I usually make a double batch and freeze most of it, so I can pull it out on a night I don't feel like cooking and toss it with some pasta.  You can find fresh roma tomatoes in the grocery store pretty much all year long, but if you're feeling lazy and don't want to take the time to peel all those tomatoes, you could use 1 28-oz of whole tomatoes in juice.   It'll make a little less sauce so feel free to use a little less garlic if you want.  If you're feeling extra lazy, you can buy packaged peeled garlic at stores like Trader Joe's or Whole Foods.  It's obviously not as fresh-tasting, but much easier.

I like to serve this sauce on top of whole wheat spaghetti.  Some people are scared of wheat pasta because it has a stronger, nuttier flavor than regular white pasta.  Something to think about is that wheat pasta has more protein and is more filling, so you tend to eat less of it.  If you want to try to ease wheat pasta into your diet, try a blend of wheat and regular pasta, upping the wheat pasta portion each time until you are used to the flavor.  Also, the smaller the noodle, the less intense the flavor; so your angel-hair or thin spaghetti noodles are going to be less wheat-y than penne or rigatoni.  And, if your sauce is flavorful enough, you won't even notice the taste of the noodles.

If you like tomato sauce, I guarantee you'll love this recipe!