I recently discovered that I have moments when my cunning gets the better of me. Today is one such time. I decided to make sauce today, so a few days ago I drove out to the farms an brought back two bushels of Italian plum tomatoes. beautiful. I also bought large sweet onions and some other items.



This morning I cleaned from 6 a.m. until about 9. That is necessary. Cleanliness almost assures that every quart jar of my pasta sauce will seal after canning. It also avoids food poisoning and other headaches.

I began the process of making my pasta sauce, as I do almost every labor Day weekend, by washing tomatoes, slicing them into small pieces, puree-ing them in my blender, grinding the puree through a food mill and dumping the uncooked sauce into the stockpots.



I have two stockpots. There is only room for two on my range top.



This year I am making a thick Bolognese style sauce, called Salsa Pomodoro alla maniera di Bologna, composed of cooked-down tomato sauce (you must use plum tomatoes), finely chopped onions, chopped sweet red peppers - fresh and also roasted red peppers, fondly called "arrosto" peppers. Other ingredients are basil, oregano, savory, olive oil, Chianti wine, Worcester sauce, garlic (lots) and Balsamic vinegar.

It is my own recipe, concocted over the years by taste and trial.

The two pots are now full and cooking down. That will take about four more hours. In the meantime, I drink a glass of Bardolino and blog.

I should end up with about 14 or 15 quarts in this batch. That will suffice to get me through a year of lasagna, linguine, tagliatelle, casseroles and whatnot. I put the jars into a cabinet way up high, so my visitors cannot reach them and steal them. It has happened. My sauce is good.

Why do I make it rather than buy it at the market? After all, it is cheaper labor-wise to buy the damned sauce. The reason I make my own is that you cannot find a store-bought pasta sauce as good as what you can make in your own kitchen.

Granted, it is back-aching work and messy (I wear a red tee shirt and an apron) but it satisfies when you pour that sauce into browned ground meat, heat it up and pour it over a plate of angel hair pasta or ziti. It is the artist at work but without paintbrushes. It is the primal thing, the hunter-gatherer roasting the game over fire, the creative spirit at work - and prompted to work by his hungry gut.

Creativity comes in all aspects of life.

I almost forgot the 'cunning' part. I started working faster because my back got sore. So I damn near cut off a finger tip with the boning knife. No harm. Just a nick. And I didn't mix the red colors, believe me.