There’s nothing like the taste of a freshly-picked tomato, but oh, jeez, there are just so many of them this time of year. Just about every meal these days seems to contain something tomato-y. And as if the piles of them that come in my weekly CSA share weren’t enough, this week I also bought a box of tomato “seconds” for making sauce.

A few years ago, my sister-in-law gave me a recipe for making roasted tomato sauce. I tried it out, and a few other recipes I found online as well, all tasty. Now I no longer follow a recipe, but just throw whatever in the pan. It always comes out good.

For this most recent batch, I used 13 tomatoes of varying sizes plus a handful of cherry tomatoes that were just about to pass their prime. I chopped up the tomatoes and put them in a baking pan, skins and all, with a medium chopped onion, five cloves of garlic, a couple of teaspoons each of dried basil and oregano, a tad of salt, and olive oil and balsamic vinegar. The amount of oil you use depends on how rich you like your sauce. I like it on the light side so add just a couple of tablespoons. On the other hand, I love the taste of balsamic vinegar so I am more generous with that.

It filled a 9×13 baking pan. I put it in a 400-degree oven for an hour and a half, until the vegetables were soft and the tomatoes were just beginning to blacken. You could probably leave it in for up to two hours, for a thicker, more blackened sauce. I’m too impatient for that. Here’s what it looks like just out of the oven:

I pureed it in the blender in batches and put it in freezer boxes. I got five pints to enjoy next winter when I’m in need of a little taste of summer.