I made a delicious dinner....if I do say so myself.  I made homemade tomato sauce, and to go with the sauce, roasted eggplant and portobello mushrooms and chicken thighs.  The chicken was on sale at work.  I just put it in a baking dish (lined with tin foil so no clean up) and baked it.

It was also our oldest daughter's birthday.  She wanted Lou Malenti's pizza, so we had that also.  I picked that up while the sauce was simmering.  Lots of good food!!!

Here's how I made the sauce.

 In a small stock pan, I put 1 onion chopped with some olive oil.

 Once the onions were a slight browned, I added 8 cubes of garlic and 5 cubes of basil (the Dorat cubes - see the things I like in my kitchen area of the blog), and 2 t of dried oregano.  I like to rub the dried herbs between my hands as I put them in the pan.  Breaking them up further releases whatever oils are left in them...allowing for more flavor to come out of the herbs.

 After about 5 minutes of the herbs and onions cooking together, I added 2 large cans of tomato puree and 1 large can of fire roasted crushed tomatoes.  I like to use fire roasted canned tomatoes whenever I can.  I like the look of the bits of char in the sauce, and I also feel like they have more flavor that just regular canned tomatoes. I added 2T red wine vinegar and 2T agave.  I am trying to cook more with agave.  If you don't have that, you can use sugar at the same proportion.  We had left over sauce, which we put in a ziploc bag and froze for another meal.

 I roasted eggplant and portobello mushrooms together.  I peel the eggplant, but do like to leave just a bit of the purple skin on it.  I like the texture it adds to the eggplant.  I also use non-stick tin foil.  I love that product!!

 Here is my dish...as you can see, I added some mozzarella cheese.  Just a bit, but that stringy bite would be missed if I didn't have it.  This was very healthy and very, well, great.  The sauce it so good it can go on anything and it would be delicious!

Here are the cupcakes I bought at work to celebrate with.  Major yum here!  I bought 5 different flavors....left to right....double chocolate, red velvet, chocolate mint, smores, and oreo.  We cut them into halves and shared.