A great tomato sauce can be the basis of many delicious meals. Whether you feel like making spaghetti, ratatouille, grilled cheese sandwiches with tomato soup, or anything else with a tomato base, this sauce will work wonderfully. It’s simple to make, uses fresh ingredients, and making the sauce is a great activity to involve the kids in!

The Perks of Homemade Tomato Sauce

Although tomato sauce from a can is sometimes more convenient, homemade is always better because you can avoid all the chemicals and additives used to keep canned or jarred sauces fresh. What’s more, having complete control over the ingredients, you can make sure the flavors are exactly to your liking by increasing or cutting back on garlic, substituting onions for shallots, and more.

Recipe Variants With Fresh Tomatoes

If you choose to go with fresh tomatoes, grape and cherry tomatoes are usually available throughout the year in supermarkets. To make around four servings of tomato sauce, use two pints of these types of tomatoes and follow one of the simple recipes below!

A Pan Sauce With Cherry Tomatoes

To make a cherry tomato pan sauce, heat a bit of olive oil in a saucepan over medium heat and place in halved cherry tomatoes with some minced garlic to your taste. After about 20 minutes of cooking, you should get a stirrable sauce. At that point, add salt and pepper, and any preferred dry herbs, like basil or oregano.

Roasted Tomatoes for a Smokier Flavor

Another alternative is making the tomato sauce with roasted cherry tomatoes, in which case you keep the tomatoes whole. Preheat the oven to 400 Fahrenheit. Arrange the tomatoes in a single layer in a baking dish and drizzle them with olive oil, salt, and pepper. Roast for up to 25 minutes until the tomatoes split open and the skin begins to lightly char. Transfer them into a bowl, season to taste, and mix!

Roshani Mahadevan Schaefer works as a humanitarian aid consultant, which is a career that requires a lot of international travel. She and her husband have known for years that they wanted to start trying to get pregnant in 2020. Doing so earlier would have been hard as her job requires her to go to refugee camps in Lebanon close to the Syrian border.

A Plan to Get Pregnant

In 2019, the couple took a step back from their work and went on vacation, visiting almost 40 countries. They hoped to come back after their vacation and get pregnant the following year. Despite the pandemic that was unwinding in the world, they were moving forward with their plan until Roshani’s doctor called.

Doctors were unable to answer questions that many prospective parents had regarding the pandemic as little was known about it at the time.

Her doctor informed her that the couple could still try to get pregnant since they were both working remotely and able to spend most of their time isolating at home.

Roshani’s confidence was shaken when she found out about an infant that was dying in Connecticut because of health concerns that potentially stemmed from the pandemic.

Other Concerns Surrounding a Pregnancy

Aside from worrying about the pandemic and the effect that it could have on both her and the baby’s health, Roshani was also concerned about the restrictions on hospital visits. She mentioned that being a non-white female, she is worried that she might have to give birth without anyone advocating for her health. This is because there is a higher mortality rate during birth for non-white mothers.

While there are many incentives to waiting to get pregnant, she also knows that there can be problems too, like the time it takes to conceive.

She mentioned that it was a huge roadblock in what they had been planning for a while.