The Elusive Marinara Sauce

Our Meatless Monday dish tonight was gnocchi with garlic tomato sauce. It turned out so-so. The gnocchi was a little undercooked. The recipe said to pull them out of the water as soon as they floated, but they really needed a few more minutes. The gnocchi were made of only potatoes and flour. I prefer ones made with a little egg. They definitely needed salt. The sauce seemed bland, even though it had 9 cloves of garlic and a ton of herbs. It could be because the garlic was my more mild Inchelium Red. Had I used Music, you definitely would've tasted it. Mr. E says that it needs to be baked in sauce, which my recipe didn't say to do. He tried it and said it helped a bit.

I'm trying to find a new marinara sauce. The one I used to make used a can of condensed tomato soup and a can of tomato sauce. But I'm trying to get away from high fructose corn syrup, which is in the tomato soup now, and there's no getting around that. My new sauce would preferably be something I could make from my own tomatoes. Making tomato sauce is easy. I've canned some before. I just want that bold, creamy taste....

The one good thing that happened tonight was that I finally got to use my immersion blender. You have to be careful, but man, did that work great! In a matter of seconds I had all the tomatoes pulverized into a perfect saucy consistency. I always hated using the food processor (it leaked) or the blender (too small) for soups, and then all the dishes afterwards. Now I won't have to, and only the stick to wash! I can think of a million things I can use it for - applesauce, soups, tomato sauces.... Okay, maybe not a million.