Let's Get Saucey!

Every year my family and I go to a farm in Jersey to pick tomatoes for our annual sauce making event. Well, because the rules have changed since I was little, we are now forced to go to the farms and just buy crates of tomatoes that have already been picked. It is a bit disappointing especially because it was such a monumental event that I looked forward to as a child. We would get up bright and early and drive out to the farm and get down to business in the fields. It was a bit easier for me to crouch down and pick the tomatoes because I was O so tiny, but it would get a bit difficult for my parents to crouch and bend and crouch and bend, so I would do most of the work ;) (at least I made it seem that way). So every year we would get itchy and buggy in the tomato field and drive on home with crates of tomatoes in the back of our van. A few days later we got going with the sauce making process.

This year, though we didn't pick the tomatoes ourselves, we still loaded up the van with crates of tomatoes and headed on home to lay them out on the porch. The tomatoes were simply beautiful! We gave them a few days to fully ripen and then it was ready to get saucey! My parents and I prepped the jars, the pots of boiling water, the tubes and the tomato machine and we got going. I was the squisher (as I have always been) and when my dad would put the tomatoes at the top of the machine, I was there ready with the wooden spoon to squish them down into the machine so it could do its job of separating the sauce and the skin. Once the tomatoes go through the machine, we take the skin and put it throw the machine two times to get any final tomato sauce out. What we're left with are tubes of red, freshly squeezed tomato juice that we turn into sauce once we jar them, boil them and wait for the seal to pop.

It's quite a lengthy process with little steps in between the actual steps of picking the tomatoes and jarring the sauce, but it is a process that has been in my family for generations. The annual sauce-making day is quite a venture and a bonding experience for the Sellecchia's. No one can deny that having fresh, homemade sauce with your pasta is the best thing an Italian can hope for, as well as those who eat the food ;)

Can't wait to cook up some sauce and get going with the spaghetti. I think the water is boiling now, so I better run and put the spaghetti in! Buon Appetite!