Homemade Spaghetti Sauce

This probably doesn't save us any money but we make and can our own homemade spaghetti sauce. Wendy has done it for years but last year I joined in with her and we decided to make it a yearly thing. My daughter Jaimie has also been part of this two year tradition (as well as Noah and Bret.)
It helps that Wendy has a really cool device called a Squeezo that looks like it's from the 1950's but does a terrific job of extracting all of the tomato and none of the seeds and skin.  Her Mother-in -Law, Elna is also wonderfully generous with her extra tomatoes because you can never have too many. This year we "put up" 30 quarts. We felt we were more organized than last year but still left the experience with many notes on how we could do this better next year (more tomatoes!).
Despite the quarts I took home, what I really gained was the memory of laughter between Wendy, Jaimie and I. We have an unique relationship since in some ways, Jaimie has two mothers.  Our teasing and clowning make this a day that is really about love so I thought I would write about it here.

If you are interested in making your own spaghetti sauce here is what we do:
Run the tomatoes through the Squeezo. If you don't have one, you can cook them and run them through a food mill. Your initial sauce will really be tomato juice. Turn it into sauce by adding tomato paste (Wendy recommends Contandina). You can cook it for as long as you want. Add plenty of seasoning to taste. This includes basil, oregano,  parsley and lots of salt. You can add whatever you like though, some years we have added some red wine. Trust me, this is better than you can buy.