Sweet Sauce

We picked another bunch of cherry and grape tomatoes from the container garden this morning.  I was running out of ideas so I resorted to the Breville machine to reduce these to juice to simmer down into sauce.  We ended up with about 5 cups of juice that reduced to about 1 -1/2 cups of sauce.  I added some garlic, a shake or two each of dried basil and oregano, a little onion powder and salt and ground pepper.  It didn’t seem enough for the dish I was thinking about so I opened a small can of diced tomatoes and added that to the sauce.

We have some chicken fingers I wanted to use in a tomato/pasta dish so I boiled rigatoni and filled a casserole dish with them and stirred in most of the sauce mix.  Next came a layer of the chicken, the rest of the sauce, then a layer of sliced mozzarella.  I popped that into a 350 oven until the cheese melted and the exposed pasta started to crust over.The dish is garnished with sliced fresh basil and a grind of black pepper.  We both dug in and were very pleasantly surprised with the flavor of the sauce – it almost was like sugar had been added it was so sweet.  I know it didn’t come from the can of tomato bits, it had to be from the cherry tomatoes.  Amazingly sweet!