#!side

I know I haven’t been around for a bit and I do apologize for burdening everyone, but I’m back and ready to go again! And to get started with some rebooting, I decided to start with something a little simple but also deceptively tricky! Plus, tomato sauce is a base for a LOT of recipes in Eorzea! Most of them I LOVE -- so you’ll be seeing this sauce a lot. You’ll need a couple things before we start though -- a blender or food processor and either a slow cooker (as you know, one of my favorite things!) or a large, heat conducting pot. I have made the sauce in both a pot and a slow cooker and both work perfectly fine. For this time I made with a slow cooker ~

First off, chop your garlic and onions and add to a hot sauce pan with olive oil, salt and pepper to crisp it up. While that’s caramelizing, add your other ingredients to your pot or slow cooker. If you are using cherry tomato’s instead of sun dired tomato’s as I did add those to your onions and garlic to soften them a bit. When everything is crispy, then add the garlic and onion to your sauce.

It should look a little like this before we start cooking. In this instance I added a little bit of chicken stock just so that the sauce has a little more moisture to prevent burning. You can use vegetable stock or omit all together if you have a cooker that has custom temperatures or a sturdy enough pot. A burnt tomato sauce will make chef’s everywhere cry though! Plus the little burst of flavor the broth adds will add another depth of flavor to your sauce. Set your stove and cooker to LOW and a timer for 4 1/2 hours and let the flavors run wild!

Look at how smooth the sauce is looking now! But it could be smoother .. remember how smooth the sauce was for our mole loaf? We want it to be like that! So put it in the blender and give it a nice little blend for about 30 seconds while its still hot and we should come out with a nice silky smooth sauce like so .. ...