Spaghetti sauce

Every year I plant tomatoes...and every year I wonder what will I do with all these tomatoes. 
This year I read a blog post about freezing tomatoes and I discovered the answer to the endlessly frustrating season that is tomato season.  I love canned tomatoes, chili and hot dishes just taste better, I do not however love the process.  Canning every week seemed tedious and time consuming and really just when was that suppose to fit into our already crazy schedule.  I rarely had success in stretching the ripe tomatoes into a couple of weeks. Which would have reduced the constant canning.  I quickly grew to dislike the whole process, and yet there I was every spring planting those tomato plants.  Yes I realize that makes no sense at all. Perhaps in the heart of it was the simple flow from a time long ago, a connection to childhood when this was done every summer.  Sometimes when so much of that memory has disappeared you hang onto the bit that remains.  I remember countless summer days in a steamy, sticky kitchen, the heat from outside combined with the heat from the cooking tomatoes inside  turned the kitchen into a furnace. There my mom would stand peeling tomatoes, packing jars, and canning them in water baths, which filled the room with steam and made the windows foggy, (perfect for little fingers to doodle on)  and later a row of jars would sit upon dish towels on the counter.
Eventually as the jars cooled you would hear the pop of the jars sealing.  It was magical that quiet pop in the now still kitchen.  Even tho I strongly disliked the work those tomato plants would add to my full schedule I still planted those plants just to remember a time shared with my mom.   Every year I would pick tomatoes and try to can them having mediocre success at best. Between spoiling tomatoes or non sealing jars I often wondered why this was so complicated. 
A few years ago my friend Kelly came to visit and cheerfully used all my tomatoes in spaghetti sauce. She left us with jars of canned sauce, we wept every time we ate it.  Late last winter we used the last jar and I in all seriousness told Kelly it was time for another visit, we were out of spaghetti sauce.  She laughed and said when she came next year for the wedding she would be happy to remedy that.  Sigh, never did a year seem so long.  Which lands us where I started this post the discovery that you could freeze tomatoes. No I didn't know of this wondrous option, but I  quickly read up on it and decided that this year we would try this.  Every time we picked tomatoes we would wash them, cut the stems off and quarter them. Tossing them into gallon freezer bags and putting the bags into the freezer.  The article explained that once the growing season was complete you simply took all those frozen bags of tomatoes and in one day processed them, whether canning tomatoes for chili or making spaghetti sauce.  Sounded so basic and simple and actually it was.  I decided to use the tomatoes for spaghetti sauce this year and so I filled the soup pot with bags of frozen tomatoes and simmered and cooked for most of the day.  A total of 12 bags of tomatoes eventually filled that pot.  With a few phone calls to Kelly for spice advice the house soon smelled amazing.  At the end of the day a row of jars lined the kitchen counter and for the first time in years this tomorrow season felt like a success.