Tomato Sause and Pancakes

Lindsey and I made a tomato sauce last night. Man, there are a lot of bad recipes for tomato sauce. We've try this three times now and each one was hardly eatable. Last nights was the Good Eats Tomato Sauce that Alton always brags about. It was way way too much work for something that was not good. Does anyone know a good tomato sauce recipe? I want to keep at this until I find one that's as good as the stuff in a jar. Here are things I think I'm looking for in a tomato sauce:

• No carrots! Tomato sauce is supposed to taste like tomatoes, not carrots. Tomato sauce is supposed to be red. Carrots make the sauce taste like carrots and orange.
• Not sweet. Sweet is not a feature I like in tomato sauce. All the sauce I've done have ended up sweet, partly because we've tried to rescue the bitter sour taste by adding a little sugar. Not a good move.
• Use canned tomato. This is a personal thing. I don't like tomatoes, but I love tomato sauce. I think real tomatoes have bad flavors that get broken down in the canning process which makes them ok. "Fresh" is not feature I want in sauce. It should be stewed.
• Less than 1 hour. If this is going to be a recipe that we are going to do more than once, it really can't take all day. Last night's tomato goo took 3 hours. If I find a fast recipe I can make it on a week night.

Anybody have any ideas?

 

Lindsey also made some pancakes yesterday. We've been working and the recipe for a while now and she stumbled across a key breakthrough. We've tried a dozen or so recipes and Alton Brown's is the best. Apparently he has the best and worst recipes. I like bullets, so here is list of things I've figured out about pancakes:

• Pre-made dry ingredients. Alton says you can pre-make the dry ingredients, but we've never been on the ball enough to do that. It's fast enough to make anyway.
• Dried buttermilk. Buttermilk is too hard to keep on hand so we use dried butter milk. My sister found this stuff and it's great to always have butter milk on hand. It seems to be in the dried milk section of the store, not the milk, buttermilk, butter or baking section.
• Always whip egg whites. We have an egg separator which make that a mindless operation. Mindless things are always good in the morning before the coffee's set it. We have an electric eat beater which takes about 60 seconds to whip the eggs. Key things here are to but the whites in a medium sized bowl and tip the bowl so you get a flowing action with the beater. You don't really need to move the beater until they are almost done. Use the highest setting on beater because it will take all day on the low setting.
• Mix the batter enough. Everyone tells you to go light on the mixing. Don't over do it because it can make the pancakes rubbery, but it takes more than 10 turns of a spatula to fold in egg whites. Give it a good whipping.
• Lindsey's breakthrough: Chop the chocolate chips. We used to use minichips because the regular sized ones are too big. But yesterday we ran out of minichips and only had the big ones so she put them in our electric spice (coffee) grinder. (Don't tell Jeff that his spice grinder is covered in chocolate.) Chopped chocolate chips make little veins of chocolate run through the pancakes without a lot of gooey parts. I think I'll try the cheese grater next time to get long thin pieces of chocolate without getting to much dust.

MMMmmmm pancakes....