Homemade Pizza Sauce

We like to have a pizza night each weekend and that means we regularly use pizza sauce.  Since it is a goal of mine to make as much as possible from scratch without completely compromising my sanity - some would say that it's questionable that I haven't already done so ;-) - I decided to can some homemade pizza sauce this year.  I found this recipe to use as a guide and made several batches of sauce to put by. 

I cooked some tomatoes and then ran them through my tomato press to get rid of the skins and most of the seeds.  Then I added that to some sauteed onions and garlic.

 I added the spices I wanted to use and let it simmer.

And simmer.

 And simmer, until finally it was done.

I did find that I had to simmer it for an awfully long time to get it to the thickness that I wanted.  It had me remembering how long it took to get last year's homemade catsup thickened.  When it was finally thick enough I put it in jars with a bit of lemon juice and then processed them in the hot water bath.   They've been tucked away in the coldroom and will be there to use on our pizza nights throughout the winter.  Delicious...plus I was able to use up a LOT of my tomato surplus.