Tomato season always brings me joy in an otherwise oppressively hot August (anything above 90 degrees is oppressive to me).  I rejoice at their first harvest and quickly begin making sauce.  For the following four weeks, I will race against time to make and jar as much tomato sauce as possible before the tomatoes are gone.  

Making sauce is a long and arduous process.  First, I blanch the tomatoes (for bolognaise sauce I use San Marzainos) and remove their skins (about 45 minutes for enough tomatoes to make sauce).  Then, I chop onions, garlic, and herbs (another 45 minutes).  By the time I am ready to turn a flame on in the kitchen, nearly two hours have passed (I am allotting time for cleaning up in between steps).  

The next steps – sautéing the aromatics, reducing with wine, adding herbs and tomatoes – take about a half-an-hour, and then the sauce has to cook for three-to-four hours following.  At that point, I will puree the sauce, taste for seasoning, and return to low heat for another 15 -20 minutes. 

This process gives me a base sauce for either a marinara, a bolognaise sauce, a basil and mushroom sauce, or whatever flavor combination strikes my fancy.  My first batch of sauce this season became a marinara, which I used up completely two weeks ago.  The next batch started out as a base sauce last weekend.  Today, I made a bolognaise from it: I chopped onions, garlic and herbs (30 minutes); sautéed the aromatics along with the ground pork (20 minutes); reduced with wine (5 minutes); then added the base sauce and allowed it to cook (20 minutes).  While the sauce cooked, I prepped the jars for the canning process (15 minutes); then jarred up the sauce (15 minutes) and returned the closed jars to a pot of water to boil for another 10 minutes.

I also started a new batch of base sauce today made solely from heirloom tomatoes, Brandywines, Purple Cherokees, bright yellow (not sure what their name is) and sweet tomatoes.  This batch is cooking down into a base sauce as we speak.

All told, the bolognaise sauce took about 7 ½ hours to make and jar.  I expect that the marinara will take about the same.  For all this work, I have only four jars of bolognaise sauce.  I will likely end up with about four jars of marinara as well.

I hope to get at least one more batch of sauce made before the tomatoes are gone.  For all the work that I put into making the sauce, I am lucky if I make it to January with any left.  You many question whether all this work is worth the effort for only four jars of sauce – I promise you that it is.  Homemade sauce from fresh tomatoes is far superior to anything you can buy in a jar from a supermarket and still markedly better than homemade sauce from canned tomatoes.  Yes, the results are worthy of the effort.

After spending most of the day in the kitchen, I still needed to cook dinner.  I expected one of my cousins to stop by for food and had to get cooking.  Guy had these beautiful bell peppers in red, yellow, and green at the farm this morning.  I purchased a bunch of them and prepared sausage and peppers for dinner.  

Sausage and peppers appeared on many a Sunday supper menu at the homes of my Italian friends growing up.  Delis, Pizzerias, and Italian restaurants throughout Brooklyn always carried it on their menus.  You could find Sausage and Peppers at almost house party or special occasion.

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I also had some of the last blueberries left this season, and chose to make one final blueberry pie before delving into apple and peach pies, and eventually pumpkin.

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While cooking, I drank (and cooked with) a bottle of The Foundry Vignoier from South Africa that tasted like a dry lemonade of fresh lemons.  During dinner, Caryn and I drank a bottle of Salmon Run Riesling from New York State that tasted like an apple orchard, reminding me that fall is upon us…  My favorite season!