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Home ยป Cleaner Eating with Homemade Sauces

Cleaner Eating with Homemade Sauces

March 29, 2012 //  by Donielle Baker

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A great way to cut your grocery budget and keep your food free from additives, is to make your own sauces at home. In fact it’s one of the very first things I did when we switched to a more whole foods diet.

To be honest, we were broke. I had just quit my full-time job to stay at home and we were pinching pennies pretty tightly. I think Lincoln’s face wore off some of them.

It finally hit me when I was grocery shopping, picking up overpriced pizza sauce, that hey – I could probably figure out how to make this! And I did, and we’ve never stopped. We’ve made some changes to the recipe we began using and enjoy it even more.

Summertime is a wonderful time at my house, the smell of garden fresh tomatoes cooking down, filled with flavor.

Delish.

Home-grown & made Tomato Sauce
photo credit: mountainash

And of course we can branch out beyond the tomato based sauces to cover white sauces and cheese sauce. The basis for many of my homemade casseroles and a family favorite – mac and cheese.

Once you know how to make a cheese sauce, you can start whipping up your own nacho cheese sauce for tortilla chips. or sauce to drizzle over steamed veggies or potatoes. The possibilities are pretty much endless.

Here are some of our favorite sauces:

  • Homemade Pizza Sauce
  • Homemade Spaghetti Sauce
  • Pink Sauce for pasta
  • Italian Cream Cheese sauce for casserole
  • Basic White Sauce (from The Local Cook)(we do variations of this sauce depending on the cheese we have on hand)
  • Mac and Cheese (from The Pioneer Woman)
  • Burrito Sauce

Leave a comment and let me know what sauces you make from scratch!

 

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Some links (including Amazon.com links) in our posts might be affiliate links. This means that, at no additional cost to you, I may earn an affiliate marketing commission if you make a purchase.

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Donielle Baker

Donielle Baker

owner and editor of Natural Fertility and Wellness at Natural Fertility and Wellness
I believe women can learn how to heal their bodies & balance their hormones through natural methods. An advocate for natural health, I have a passion for nourishing/real food nutrition and natural living. My personal background includes both infertility and miscarriage and I started Natural Fertility and Wellness in 2008 in order to share all of the information I found helpful in my journey to heal from PCOS and overcome infertility.
Donielle Baker

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Category: Real FoodTag: Journey to Real Foods

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Previous Post: « Healthier Soups {31 days of cleaner living}
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Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. martine

    March 29, 2012 at 12:36 pm

    Do you have a recipe for a verry thick basic tomato sauce?

    • donielle

      March 29, 2012 at 1:24 pm

      @martine, I just stem a bunch of tomatoes, chop them up, blend until smooth in my blender, and simmer on the stove until I get the thickness I want. Then add a bit of salt for a very basic sauce. But from there you can add in just about anything!

  2. Marsha_M

    March 29, 2012 at 12:42 pm

    I make my own enchilada sauce and it is so good. I found the recipe on Passionate Homemaking website and use the enchilada sauce for soup also not just for enchiladas. I am hoping to get lots of tomatoes this summer and try making a basic tomato sauce for pizza, enchiladas, and soups.

  3. Mallory Cook

    March 29, 2012 at 12:54 pm

    Wow! Thanks for the post, I have been wanting to try and make my own sauce for a while now!

  4. Mallory Cook

    March 29, 2012 at 1:10 pm

    Wait so how do you make just the plain tomato sauce? How many tomatos and what do you exactly do? I noticed the recipes both say an amount of tomato sauce…

    • donielle

      March 29, 2012 at 1:23 pm

      @Mallory Cook, Ahhh….I guess I’ve never posted how to make it. ๐Ÿ™‚

      All I do is chop up some tomatoes (take the stems out), maybe 6 cups worth depending on how much water they have in them, blend them until they’re smooth, and simmer on the stove until they reach the thickness I like. The season and put any leftover sauce in the freezer for things like chili.

      The amount of sauce you end up with will always be different based on the tomato – how ripe it is, what type it is, etc. So I always just make more than I think I’ll need since it doesn’t go to waste. ๐Ÿ™‚

      • Diana

        March 30, 2012 at 9:35 am

        @donielle, Thanks! I have some tomatoes waiting in my freezer, but I’d been putting off the sauce because I wasn’t sure what I was doing. I thought you had to cook and then blend, but it makes a lot more sense the other way. Duh! ๐Ÿ™‚ (Btw, you can freeze whole tomatoes. Run under warm water, and the skins come right off. My husband doesn’t like the skins in sauce, so that’s the best way for me to do it.)

        • donielle

          March 30, 2012 at 1:48 pm

          @Diana, I’ve done the freezer thing before – I got ‘lazy’ one year when they were all ripening and just tossed them all in the freezer whole. Actually….I rather enjoyed it, very little prep time! Except I’d always forget that I had to make the sauce from scratch and end up having to use canned. doh!

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