Making Tomato Sauce

For Italian families, tomato sauce is a pantry essential because it is used so often in cooking. Like many Italians, my grandparents make their own. Since I’d like to continue the tradition, I helped out in making it (Plus it’s fun and the taste beats any store-bought brand out there). Typically, the tomatoes are ordered and delivered to my grandparent’s house. Other times, they go to Arthur Avenue in the Bronx to purchase them. From 3 crates, each weighing about 63 pounds, there was a lot of tomato sauce to be had! And so, on an early September morning we got right to work making sauce to have until next year. Here's how the process goes:

1. Dice the tomatoes.

2. Boil the tomatoes and add basil, salt, and olive oil.

3. Grind them up.

4. Fill the jars.

The sauce should be very hot when added to the jars.

It can be messy to make, but once you gaze at your collection of beautiful red jars, it’s so worthwhile. The best part for me is spending time with my nonna and nonno. It makes me feel all the more Italian even though I’m in a garage in New York and not on a farm in Sicily.

Italian word of the day: salsa di pomodoro; tomato sauce

Penne....yum.

Ciao readers!

No, there isn’t a typo in the title of my blog. Penne translates to “pens” in Italian. It’s also a kind of pasta. Not so coincidently, each piece of penne pasta looks like the nib of a pen.

For my first post, I’d like to confess a couple things about myself.

1. I am half Italian. To some people, my muddled racial blood does not make it okay for me to just say I’m Italian. But I’m sick of having to explain (in essence, apologize) the precise amount of Italian blood in me every time I say to someone that I’m Italian. If you must know, my remaining heritage, from my mother’s side, is very diverse; French Canadian, Irish, English, Norwegian, and German, just to name the ones I’m certain of. It’s hard to make any cultural connection when there are that many cultures. They are pretty much indistinguishable in my family, and there are few traditions from any of those countries that we truly hold on to and deem special. There’s nothing wrong with that. The Italian, however, dominates. Not just because it takes up half my background, but also because the traditions of Italy are strong in my life thanks to my father’s side of the family. It’s a huge part of who I am. There’s no mistaking it. I even look like my father’s mother—Nonna, we call her.

2. I don’t speak Italian well. But to be fluent in Italian is probably the number one thing I wish to accomplish most in my lifetime! I used to be bitter about not having been raised bilingual (I’m not bitter anymore).  I asked my father about it one day. He said he didn’t because I was with him much less than I was with my mother, who does not speak Italian. And so it was not passed on. Oh well. I’m over it. Instead, I studied the language in school. When I no longer took Italian classes in college, I studied with a tutor. Still though, it does not stick very well in my brain. Until my dream comes true and I actually get to live in Italy (hah!), where I’m completely immersed in the language, I’ll have to be content with memorizing and rememorizing the vocabulary whenever I get a chance. One day, Italian will roll off my tongue like I’m a native. And one day, when I have children, I will raise them to speak it as well.

Italian word of the day: nonna n — grandma. You’ll be well acquainted with my nonna as you read this blog.