Victorio victorious!

When my grandpa moved into a nursing home years ago and we were cleaning out his house, I picked up a Victorio Food Strainer from his pantry and took it.  It was all still in the box and it remained there until this morning when I decided maybe I'd try to process some tomatoes and make marinara. It looked like he'd only used it once maybe because nearly everything was still sealed up!  I picked yet another big bowl of tomatoes this morning so I needed to make something delicious with them!

After doing this, I have a newfound respect for jarred sauces - I felt like it took a LOT of tomatoes to get this amount of juice!  It was about 40 oz when I was done, and it was very watery so I knew it'd need to simmer down quite a bit.  At first I felt like there was a lot going into the waste bowl, but it actually did a great job of just separating the skins.  (My yellow gooseberry Pyrex bowls helped out too! :)

I used the biggest strainer - I suppose a smaller one would have removed the tomato seeds, but then I'd just have had juice.  There are 3 other sized strainers that come with it - berry, pumpkin, and something else.  I put it on the stove with some sauted onions and garlic, a little balsamic vinegar, a little sugar, a couple bay leaves, and some dried basil and oregano.  I let it simmer for probably a hour and a half and I think it's great!  It's cooling and I haven't transferred it to anything to see just how much I got out of it - but regardless, I think it was a good use of tomatoes!