Veggie Packed Tomato Sauce

Everyone needs a quick and easy pasta sauce stored in the freezer for those rushed days. This one is your basic tomato sauce jam packed with veggies but it is absolutely delicious! I tend to make this when I've got lots of half bits of veggies lying around and it's slightly different every time.

Ingredients

The quantities and Ingredients are fairly flexible so I will list what I typically include:

Courgette - 1 medium courgette or half a large courgette grated
Carrots - 2 large or 3 medium carrots grated
Celery - 3 celery sticks finely chopped
Onion - half a large onion or 1 medium onion
Red Pepper - half a red pepper chopped
Broccoli - I tend to add tender stem broccoli or add the softer florets
Spinach - handful of spinach
Garlic - 2 cloves peeled and chopped
Passata - around 1.5L 
Tomato Puree - good squeeze
Basil
Black Pepper
1 tablespoon Olive oil

In a deep non stick frying pan / wok, pour in the olive oil and heat up. Add the grated carrot and courgette and all the other chopped vegetable apart from the spinach. keep stirring like a stir fry for a few minutes and then lower the heat a little and pop a lid on the pan. Leave for around 10 minutes to sweat and stir occasionally. 

Add the spinach and stir in until it's sweated down. Leave the lid off with the heat on for a few minutes until any excess liquid has evaporated.

Pour in the passata and add a squirt of tomato puree, some chopped basil and black pepper.  Bring to the boil and then simmer with the lid on for anything between 10 to 30 minutes. I like to cook it for longer but as long as the vegetables have gone soft it's fine.

Take the sauce off the heat and then use a hand blender to blend the sauce until smooth. 

Store the sauce in appropriate sized bags or Tupperware. I always store a portion size big enough for a family pasta sauce, some for just the kids if they were having pasta and some in smaller portions for using as pizza topping. I also add a little extra tomato puree to the sauce portions being used as pizza topping.

It's always so good knowing that you've added a few extra bits of veg into the little ones (and yourself of course).

Enjoy!!