All-day Tomato Sauce, Pesto Pasta, and Eye-talian Sausage

Saturday 18 August

While Eve was delving out in the garden, Adam was cooking. The tomatoes, despite the ravages of one b*st*rd squirrel who takes a healthy bite of a single tomato a day and then just tosses it aside (doesn’t it know there are squirrels starving in China?), are coming in thick and strong.

So Saturday was spent reducing a trug-load of tomatoes into sauce. The black plums needed to be skinned, so the whole factory went on high alert: making little x's in the base of each tomate, then dunking them all in boiling water for a minute, then peeling each one. Also took the time to roast and skin lots of poblanos for stuffing and posole later on this week. Some 5 lbs. or so of black plums, San Marzanos, Early Girls, and Rutgers, a handful of garlic cloves, a mess o' onions, and a small copse of oregano went into the pot to cook down for four hours. Whatever was left over from tonight's dinner (and it wasn't much - this sauce really reduces) would be labeled "red gravy" and put in the freezer for a couple of meals down the road.









Nice home-made sauce demands nice fresh pasta, so in the interval I kneaded up a batch, tossing a cube of pesto into the mix. It produced a splendid dark green pasta, which we sliced into fettucine.

Finally, fried up some gen-you-wine Eye-talian sausage (from Eckerlin's - count on Germans to be Italian), let it stew a bit in the lovely sauce, put it all together, and Roberto è tuo zio!