This Is Why People Don't Cook

Yesterday, as promised, I made homemade tomato sauce. How did it go?

The Good: It tasted great. 

The Bad: It was way more complicated and time-consuming than I anticipated.

The Ugly: By the time I was finished my kitchen looked like several cans of tomatoes had exploded and (cue small violins) I cut my finger while slicing up the vegetables (the "mirepoix.")  

Thoughts: 

Read the recipe carefully. I was so focused on the ingredients, and in particular on the sugar and salt content, that I didn't read the recipe carefully enough before I started. If I had, I probably would have gone looking for a recipe that didn't require me to pluck the seeds out of a whole can of tomatoes, or pour the hot tomato sauce from the sauce pan into the food processor and, after puréeing it, pour the still-hot sauce back into the pan. Very messy. 

Read the labels carefully. The recipe called for one 28-ounce can of whole tomatoes and the label on the can said it contained 3 grams of sugar and 170 mgs of salt. That didn't sound too bad, but oops, I fell for the "serving size" trick. Since I was going to use the whole can in my sauce, I assumed those amounts were for the whole can. Wrong. It turns out that a 28-ounce can of whole tomatoes is considered, at least by the manufacturer, to contain *seven* servings, which means I was getting 1190 mgs of sodium and 21 grams of sugar. The ingredient list didn't include sugar, so the sugar must (I hope) occur naturally in the tomatoes, but do they have to add so much salt? 

Estimate your time carefully. The recipe took twice as long to complete as I expected it to, only partly because I had to stop and find a band-aid when I cut my finger. Chopping the onion, carrot and celery, seeding and crushing the tomatoes, and puréeing the hot sauce all took a lot longer than I expected. It also took a lot more bowls and utensils than I expected, and cleaning up the kitchen afterwards took longer too. 

So would I do it again? I'll make tomato sauce again but I'm going to find an easier recipe. I like to cook so even though things didn't go exactly as planned I still enjoyed doing it. But for people who don't like to cook or aren't used to cooking, making this recipe would be a giant pain in the neck. I can totally understand the appeal of just opening a jar of Newman's Own and heating it up in the microwave, regardless of the salt, sugar and/or fat content, which pretty much sums up the heart of the Fed Up Challenge. Tomorrow's Day 1 and I'm interested to see how it goes.