Tomato sauce.

Today I had planned to try my hand, for the first time, at making homemade pasta sauce, specifically tomato sauce.  I eat a lot of pasta, so knowing how to make homemade sauce is crucial so that I can reduce the amount of bottles and jars that I need to recycle.  I picked up many of the ingredients at Drive Organics (tomatoes, shallots, tomato paste) and a few from Superstore (celery, basil, fresh Italian herb blend).  And some white wine from a liquor store (the cheapest dry white wine I could find). The rest of the ingredients I already had in my kitchen.  The ingredients I used:

1. 9 ripe tomatoes (medium to large)
2. 2 tbsp of oil I had left over from a jar of sundried tomatoes (just use plain olive oil if you don't have anything like this to use)
3. 2 tbsp butter
4. 1 shallot, diced
5. 1 red pepper, diced
6. 4 cloves of garlic, minced
7. 1/4 cup fresh basil
8. 1 tbsp fresh Italian herb blend (less if you are using dried Italian seasoning)
9. 1/4 cup dry white wine
10. 2 stalks of celery
11. 1 small can of tomato paste (mine was 156 mL)
12. Additional seasonings to taste (I added sea salt, pepper, mustard powder, celery seed, dried basil, dried parsley flakes, dried oregano flakes)

Bulk bins.

About two weeks ago, I came across a recommendation for Weigh 2 Go, a bulk food sales store in Vancouver, British Columbia.  We live in North Vancouver, but very close to Second Narrows Bridge, which connects us very easily to both Burnaby and East Vancouver, so we have quite a few options for grocery shopping that are reasonably close.  We actually have a Safeway, Superstore and an Extra Foods within five minutes of us.  Nevertheless, I can't buy everything I would like from any one of them, so I'm always trying to find a place that has my favourite three things: bulk dry foods in bins, really good produce and reasonable prices.  Lately my strategy has been to go to Marketplace IGA for my produce and to Superstore for the dry bulk bin items.  Then I heard about Weigh 2 Go.  We tried to go there last weekend but got side-tracked looking for Tim's meat products.  So this weekend we put all of our plastic Ziplock containers in our reusable shopping bags and headed out.

My first mistake was to think that the store was anywhere near where we live.  It is actually in Dunbar-Southlands, which is very difficult to access from where we were.  It took us so long to get there that by the time we arrived I was fairly disheartened, because I knew that there was no way we would ever do this trip again.  The store itself is located in a nice little shopping area that has lots of little shops and a huge Marketplace IGA right across the street.  There was also a Stong's not too far away, so if you live in Kerrisdale or near UBC, this store might be a reasonable option for you for your dried goods.