Thinking Back to Last Week's Culinary Experiment

If you remember, last Thursday, I tried a culinary experiment: making tomato sauce totally from scratch. I knew that this recipe would not be a Celebrate Every Day recipe. After all, it would take a long, long, long time and involve many steps, making it anything but simple. Yet I wondered: would this tomato sauce be worth the investment of time and energy? Would it be better than my usual tomato sauce (which, by the way, is not any of the commercially available brands; I do make my own, just not totally from scratch)? I was pretty sure it would be.

I was wrong. As it turns out, while last week's sauce was good, it wasn't phenomenal. It wasn't even any better than my usual sauce. In fact, it wasn't as good. Peter's verdict when he first tasted it: he put down his fork and said, "I want the usual sauce!"

I've had a week now to ponder the mystery of tomato sauce. You would think that the sauce that was last week's experiment would have been superior. After all, I used the best and freshest ingredients: about a gallon of organic, vine-ripened and recently-picked tomatoes, carefully chopped; organic onions, garlic, basil fresh from our garden. But the ingredients I normally use are great too. After all, the tomatoes used to make the canned sauce and canned tomato paste are picked and processed at the height of ripeness. The only ingredient in the tomato paste is tomatoes, which have been concentrated to a sweet, tomatoey, thick goodness. The canned tomato sauce I normally use has standard ingredients: tomatoes, salt, onion, garlic, dried peppers and more -- pretty much the same as I used in last week's experiment.

What I've learned from this experiment is that you don't have to spend a lot of time cooking in order to make a great meal. It really is possible to make a meal that satisfies body and soul so you can celebrate every day.