Tomato Weekend!

Last year, Zack and I got married. For a wedding present, my friend Blake gave me two jars of homemade tomato sauce. Initially, I'll admit, my first thought was "well, I can make tomato sauce." But then I tasted it. My next thought was "how do I get me some more of that?" When I said that out loud to Blake, she invited me (and Meredith!) to what she called "tomato weekend" where her family and lots of other Italian people get together for a whole weekend to make tomato sauce, eat amazing food and drink wine. There was no way I was missing that.

Here's my basic rundown of tomato weekend. On Friday night, you wash 2500 pounds of tomatoes.


That is not even close to all the tomatoes. You dump them in giant basins of water -


- scrub the dirt off with your hands -


- and put them in laundry baskets/bins.


This is also not all the tomatoes. The tomatoes never end.

Then you drink a lot of wine, eat pizza and salad, watch several episodes of True Blood and go to bed.

The next morning, the men wake up at 4:30am and set up all the equipment. At 10:00am, they all start drinking again.


The women seem to wake up around 7:00am and get to work. First, you blanch the tomatoes (in those metal pots in back).


Then you poke them with a really long stick.


Girls aren't supposed to do the poking, but Meredith and I snuck our way in.


Then you push the tomatoes through an electric food mill.



One person pushes with a weird plastic stick thing.


Another person makes sure the machine stays running and clean.


Meredith sat here all day and her pants slipped down a little because she wasn't wearing a belt. Blake's mom gave her this dish rag to cover her butt with. Meredith was embarrassed at first, but then it caught on and she was way proud of it.


We had a special name for it. It's not fit to print.

(Okay, we called it the slut rag. But when the adults asked, we called it a modesty rag so as not to seem crude and slutty.)

Anyway, you have to run the tomatoes through the machine three more times until there's just skins and seeds.


Then the tomato puree that came out of the food mill gets boiled down with basil and salt.


This is all a really messy process. See those stains?


See our hands?


And my foot?


And my ring?


Yeah, it's silly.

Anyways, you put some basil in a jar, pour the boiling hot sauce in them -


- screw the lid on and flip them over so that it makes suction.


Do that whole process for 2500 pounds of fresh local tomatoes and 12 cases of jars. We worked for over 12 hours. Blake's mom was really proud of us and gave us awards.


That's Michael. He got an award too, but not one that was as cool as mine and Meredith's.

Did I mention the food? When you put a lot of Italians in a house together, they cook all this for lunch.


There were amazing stuffed peppers, stuffed mushrooms, caprese salad, calamari salad, chicken cutlets, mussels - I can't even name it all. It was so delicious. And that was just lunch.

This was dinner.


The first sauce of the season with ravioli tasted even better after we worked all day (and drank all day - Italians have crazy stamina).

Thanks to Blake and her family for letting us crash tomato weekend! We had the best time (and now we have three jars each of freshly made sauce - I'm not sharing, so don't ask).

Thank goodness for summer

Yesterday, I thought to myself "I should probably blog about something, I've been doing a pretty good job getting posts up lately and I shouldn't blow it" and then I realized that I had absolutely nothing to blog about. No food. No pictures. Nothing. What's a girl to do? I headed over to the farmer's market in Long Island City for some summer vegetables that my CSA doesn't provide (like eggplant - something about beetles spoiling their crop - and corn - we got some, but none for the last few weeks) and got to cooking.

My parents have heard me complain a lot about salad over the years, but truth be told, I don't mind salad all that much (if I make it myself. Or if it's from a really good restaurant). The kind of salad that I enjoy usually involves some sort of cooked component (roasted beets, warm bacon, candied walnuts, etc) and no Romaine lettuce. I can't help it. So here's my new salad of the evening:

Warm Corn and Tomato Salad

1 ear of corn
1 red pepper
1 roma tomato
1 shallot
1 clove of garlic
goat cheese
a few basil leaves
a handful of salad mix
olive oil

1. Chop up a red bell pepper, a shallot and garlic.


2. In a large pan, heat up a tablespoon or so of olive oil over medium high heat. Add the pepper, shallot and garlic to the pan and cook until the vegetables soften (a few minutes). Chop up the tomato and add that to the pan. Let the tomato break down a little, but not so much that it all turns to mush. Then cut the kernels off the ear of corn and add those too. Cook until the corn is just warmed through. Season with salt and pepper to taste.


3. Throw a little salad mix at the bottom of a salad bowl. I coated it with a little bit of basil oil and freshly ground pepper, but it's not really necessary.


4. Pour the warm vegetable mixture on top of the leaves. Add some freshly crumbled goat cheese and torn basil on top and enjoy!


This salad was really delicious. The cool goat cheese and warm corn played off each other well. It was a great way to get some end of the summer vegetables into our meal (please say summer's not over! I'm not ready for winter!!!!!!!!!).

This is my comfort food

So over the past week, someone asked me, "what's up? Aren't you cooking anything?" and I realized that the answer was "No." So after a boring week of lackluster food, I decided to take advantage of my voice lesson being canceled and make one of the recipes that I've been staring at for several days.

Marcella Hazan (you may remember, I read her book a while back), and who is known (at least in my mind) as that Italian lady on PBS with the lame arm, is a genius. I got her essential cookbook for Xmas (thanks, Margie and Hugh!) and there is one recipe in it that people seem to go wild for. Smitten Kitchen and the Amateur Gourmet both love it. I've always been skeptical. For one thing - the only ingredients are tomatoes, an onion and butter. What kind of crazy list is that? For another - it's a tomato sauce that takes over 45 minutes to make. My tomato sauce usually consists of some sauteed onion and garlic, a can of whole peeled tomatoes and salt, maybe some dried oregano, pepper, whatever. It usually takes about 20 minutes.

However - I like tomato sauce. I have extra time today. Why not? So here goes nothing.

Tomato Sauce with Butter and Onion

28 ounces whole peeled tomatoes (I used a 35 oz can. Whoops)
5 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 medium-sized yellow onion, peeled and halved
Salt to taste



The neat thing about this recipe? No chopping. Enjoy.

Put the tomatoes, onion, a bit of salt and butter in a heavy saucepan over medium heat. Bring the sauce to a simmer then lower the heat to keep the sauce at a slow, steady simmer for about 45 minutes, or until droplets of fat float free of the tomatoes. Stir occasionally, crushing the tomatoes against the side of the pot with a wooden spoon. Remove from heat, discard the onion (I know! Crazy! But just do it), add salt to taste.

Marcella says people have been known to just eat this sauce with a spoon and let me tell you, that couldn't be more true. That's pretty much what I've been doing all afternoon.

Here's the sauce (mixed with some whole wheat linguine):


It's messy. It's delicious. It's simple. I am so making this again.

Also, I'm already predicting my dad's comment on this post. Something along the lines of: Why do you add butter to everything? Ruining a perfectly good healthy dish. I only weigh 120 pounds. Blah blah blah.

To which I preemptively reply: Shut it. I cook what I want. I like a little butter now and then. And so do my readers.