Homemade Marinara Sauce with Ravioli

I needed to do something with all the tomatoes we had (probably about 15 of them). I had read this New York Times article about grating tomatoes rather than peeling them, so I thought I'd grate tomatoes and make marinara sauce.

The technique worked really well, although I first started by using the second smallest grater holes, rather than the biggest one. The bigger ones work MUCH better, and you don't have to worry about scraping your fingers.

Before grating tomatoes, cut in half ("along the equator") and scrape out as many seeds as possible.

I made up the marinara sauce recipe as a I went. Here's what I did and what we did with the first batch of sauce.

-About 15 tomatoes (I didn't count before I started), grated.

-1 yellow onion, chopped

-A couple cloves of garlic, minced

-About a teaspoon of sugar

-About 1 cup loosely packed basil leaves

-Couple shakes of oregano, fennel, pepper, salt, crushed red pepper, cayenne pepper

-Olive oil

Heat oil in a saute pan. Saute onion and garlic until fragrant.

Add tomatoes and rest of ingredients.

Simmer on low for about an hour. The sauce should reduce and not be as watery.

It made about three batches that fit in three Tupperware containers. We put two in the freezer and used one for ravioli the next night.

For the ravioli, we used a container of frozen Rising Moon creamy artichoke and olive ravioli. You just low boil it for a few minutes until the ravioli floats and is pillowy.

With the sauce, we had eggplant and yellow summer squash to use up. So we sauteed the chopped vegetables with some olive oil and a bit of garlic powder, salt and pepper. After it was tender, we added the sauce to it and heated everything up.

The sauce turned out really good. It's a bit more watery than jarred sauce, but still was delicious!