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SAUCY!

Posted by Christine on August 22, 2011 in food |

This summer I didn’t plant a garden. There were a couple reasons for my lack of ambition this year. One…we got a late start in the spring as we had a massive monsoon season. Two…we got bogged down putting together the WOODEN JIHADIST WEASEL! That, coupled with some other personal family crises in the early spring kept us pretty much out of the running for planting any type of veggies.

Luckily, my 82 year old grandma decided its still in her best interest to plant a gigantic garden each summer while crawling around on her very arthritic knees weeding the whole thing. I profited a whole bucket full of tomato’s out of her garden and decided to make sauce to get us through the winter.

I’ve canned sauce pretty much my whole life. When I lived at my parents house, they’d pick one weekend in the summer and designate it as sauce weekend. They’d force my brother and I to help wash, chop, strain, and mix the sauce ALL DAY LONG. We’d end up making usually between 80-100 jars of sauce for the whole year. For those of you that are unaware….that’s a lot of fucking tomatoes.

For whatever reason, when I got married I decided to take up this tradition myself. Because clearly hating it for all those years when I was younger was not enough torture, I now had to lay it on my own children as well. As soon as Cardin is old enough to wield a knife she is in on the production.

Here is a little picture by picture sequence to guide you through the action:

STEP 1: first you have to chop all the tomatoes. Taking care to remove the stems and any rotten sections; which becomes a royal pain in the ass.

STEP 2: next you have to puree the chopped tomato’s in your blender. CAUTION: do not remove your hand from the top, it is likely that tomato gunk will splatter the ceiling causing many an obsenity.

STEP 3: once the tomato’s are a nice smooth puree, pour the mixture into a bowl, straining through a fine metal strainer to catch all the guts and skin.

STEP 4: stir until your arm wants to fall off so only the puree goes into the pot. At this point you should feel free to pull out your wine and go heavy hitters with it. You’re going to have to do this stirring shit a lot more. THIS IS THE MOST NECESSARY STEP. If you are going to leave out any step make sure it is not this one.

STEP 5: once you are done to just the guts in the strainer, scoop them out and put them aside. Feel free to make art.

STEP 6: repeat steps 1-5 (mostly #4 though) over and over until you have strained all the tomato’s and your arm feels as though its made of ceramic.

STEP 7: throw a whole bunch of seasoning into the pot. We don’t measure anything, we just dump. The more the merrier. Boil this shit for 3-4 hours.

STEP 8: while it is hot, transfer this to canning jars. CAUTION LADY: hot. can burn. Put a canning top on super tight. Turn the jar over, I’m told this helps to seal the jar. I’m not really sure if it’s true but it’s what my mom always did, and her mom, and her mom….so I suppose some Italian lady knew what they were doing.

STEP 9: voila. You have just made Italian sauce via Listen Lady

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