Since some of our cherry tomatoes were super sugar-sweet (White Currant Cherry Tomatoes - check them out, they're fantastic!), and juice or marinara sauce didn't seem like they would fit the bill. Those are better suited to full-size globe or paste tomatoes. We do like a sweet barbecue sauce though!
So we pulled out the Knob Creek Smoked Maple Bourbon and got to work.
The first step was washing and taking the stems off all the tomatoes.
Then we chunked up three medium onions that had been sitting on our counter since we harvested them a while back. To make it easy, we just threw all this in a large stock pot. Didn't even bother to cut up the tomatoes.
Turned the heat to medium high, and let it go, squashing down the tomatoes with a potato masher as they started to cook. Before long, they had simmered into a rich tomato broth. We kept this mixture on a light simmer until the onions were translucent, then turned off the heat and let it cool until it was no longer burn-your-fingers-hot.
At this point, we grabbed our food mill and ran the tomato-onion mixture through to get just the pulpy liquid, and discarded the solids.
Next, it was time to cook it down. We cleaned the stock pot and added the pulpy liquid back to it, along with the rest of the ingredient list, and simmered on medium-low for several hours, until it reached the consistency we were looking for. (At this point, I recommend tasting your sauce and deciding if you want to add anything else - more salt, sugar, spices, etc).
We ended up with a little over 7 cups of sauce. Since this wasn't an approved canning recipe, we opted to freeze our sauce in approximately 2 cup portions. It will be really easy to just drop the sauce over some pulled pork in the crock pot and let it heat up for a quick meal on a busy night!
