Roasted Tomato Sauce

After reading your last post V.

and tripping off to visit smitten kitten's blog post

on her roasted tomato sauce,

I took myself off early this morning in search of locally-grown romas.

Found these...

and the banana peppers

(I think I may stuff them with italian sausage meat!)

Came home and, like smitten,  I washed and cut the tomatoes in half

and set them out on a baking sheet with olive oil, garlic, rosemary, thyme and oregano, some salt and pepper...

and popped them in a 400 degree oven to roast for an hour.

(I wish I could share how deeply red

 the house smells right now.)

It was as much as I could do to stop myself from sitting down

with a baguette and eating them just like this.

Then it was time to throw everything into the food processor and give

it a whirl...et, voila!

 All the while the tomatoes were roasting, I'm thinking about

those banana peppers...what to do with those?

And here is what I decided.

I cut off their hot little heads and removed as many of the seeds as I could.

You could just smell the fire in them!

I quickly blanched them in boiling water, just until they were soft enough to be stuffed

without breaking.  Then I mixed together some italian sausage meat, an egg, some

breadcrumbs and little salt and pepper - and a dash of Worcestershire sauce, just because.

Then stuffed them as best as I could, made a few meatballs with the leftover meat,

and smothered the whole shebang with the roasted tomato sauce.

They are cooking away in the oven as we speak...I'm thinking about an hour.

I'm off to shower all this pepper oil off me, before I do something silly

like try to take my contact lens out!