Girls Gone Wild!

...on Tomato Day, of course!!! Come on, what did you really expect.

I have friends and family who have been carrying on the tradition of jarring tomatoes for years. They wait until tomatoes are at the peak of ripeness & flavor, in late August - early September. It seems silly to think of preserving your own tomatoes now, when we have supermarket shelves stocked with countless varieties of canned ones and jarred sauce. But there was a time when the only way you could insure having tomatoes in the winter was to jar them yourself in the summer. Although it is not necessary to do it in this day and age, there is something truely satisfying about being self sufficient, and NOT needing to rely on factories or someone else, much like whipping cream by hand. Aside from being self sufficient & "connecting with the land" aspect of it all, the thing I enjoy most about food in general is creating memories.

So, when my friend Amy approached me about jarring her grandmother's sauce (the same sauce grandma - aka "Nana" - herself has been jarring for decades), I thought this would be a nice way for Amy to connect with Nana, for me to connect with my Italian heritage, and for all of us girls involved to create a memory and tradition of our own. A memory, I might add, that we will recall every time we open a jar of Nana's sauce.

I've been intrigued by jarring/canning for some time now. I won't lie to you, though, my biggest fear is botulism. No, not the Botox "beauty product" injected into wrinkles and frown lines, but the lethal result of improperly sealed jars. I've always been tempted to jar my own strawberry jam or peaches in syrup, but properly sealing the jar seemed too daunting a task for me to even try. Thanks to Amy, her Nana's step-by-step instructions and little research, the process was surprisingly straightforward.

From what I've read, there are 2 ways to jar. You can either boil the contents for 20 minutes before filling the jars (called "cold canning"), or boil the filled and sealed jars for 20 minutes (called "pressure canning"), before cooling to create the vacuum. We opted for the former. The jars went into a water-bleach solution for sterilization, then kept them warm in a 180 degree oven. The sauce was simmering for hours before we jarred it. Just before we were ready to fill the jars, we boiled the lids to soften the "rubbers." Yes, that's what the 1942 version of the Joy of Cooking called the rubber ring inside the lid. That alone kept us laughing all day, as did the note to always use new "rubbers." If I've said it once...




Our assembly line would have made Ford proud. I filled the clean jars with sauce leaving 1/2" of space from the top, Amy wiped the tops clean, Sarah topped the jars with the (now boiled) rubbered disk part of the lid, and Kirsten screwed on the outer part of the lid. As the jars cooled we heard the "popping" of the lids as the air constricted inside the jars, creating the vacuum. Not all the jars "popped" though. We quickly remedied that, by putting them in a hot water bath, and baking them for 45 min. at 325 degrees. That seemed to do the trick.
















I'm not sure if we made enough jars for the winter, but we did make enough jars to last the year.

One Sunday night, not long after Tomato Day, Reno & I cracked open a jar of sauce to top some frozen ravioli for an easy supper. For me it brought back memories of the girls' day spent making the jars, and for Reno it brought back memories of eating jarred sauce growing up. Either way, we were more connected than we would be to a jar of Prego.

I didn't include Nana's recipe here, because we still need to work out a few kinks. However, I think you should make a sauce to your liking (or asking someone who does), and jar that. It may be a little late in the season for tomatoes this year, but I highly encourage you to jar something (jam or preserves perhaps?). You won't regret it!

And a special thanks goes out to Sarah (the one in the green tee), who actually took the pictures, and who had to send them to me 3 times for me to save them properly...you're the best!