Pantry Shelf Marinara

So, the thing about The Boy is, he's a New Jersey Italian. What does that mean? That means that if he doesn't get red sauce or a folded slice of pizza on a semi-regular basis, he has to have some kind of transfusion. I picture all the Jersey Italian boys heading to their nearest Italian deli and mainlining marinara or slapping pizza patches on their torsos. Well, I can't sit around and allow that kind of madness to infect The Boy, so I try to maintain his blood levels of red sauce at therapeutic levels.

Homemade tomato sauce, from which marinara is derived, is a huge thing in New Jersey. Like, it's a pretty big deal. Unlike a lot of families, I don't participate in the big annual tomato sauce canning parties that are a huge tradition in this state, where whole families, and sometimes entire neighborhoods will get together and blanch tomatoes, peel and de-seed them, cook huge vats of sauce, and ladle it into innumerable mason jars, just to get them through the long tomato-less Winter. I don't have the real estate to grow tomatoes and, quite frankly, the only tomatoes I've ever grown would be unacceptable to even the most desperate of woodland animals. Ugly is an understatement. Inedible is pretty accurate.

So, I created a delicious marinara sauce made from what most of us already have in our pantry. It's quick and easy, and absent all of the artificial ingredients, sweeteners and mysterious "stabilizers" of most commercial sauces. And it's nice to serve something that you made from scratch. Buon Appetito!