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My Profile
Fairytales for a Practical Princess - 2008-11-30
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11:47 a.m. - 2005-08-07
First comes jam, then comes tomato sauce. That's right, kids. Was up before the dawn pulling eleventy billion tiny tomatoes out of my VERY shaggy veggie patch. Romas, plums, and wee itty cherry tomatoes. Not precisely the best choices for tomato sauce, but you work with what ya got. Besides, I'd never made pasta sauce from scratch before. Who knew if it would turn out anyhow? I chopped and stewed and seasoned and stirred. And there big as Billy be damned was a pot full of pretty darn tasty tomato sauce. It needs straining. I went with the rough chop method and neither skinned nor seeded beforehand. Yeah, you try seeding and skinning 4 quarts of cherry tomatoes no bigger than bath beads. Since my tomaters aren't the red red kind the sauce is paler than store-bought. Sort of a vodka sauce color. Again, this is okay with me. It's not like the stuff is a cover feature in Gourmet. It wants a bit more cooling then a run through the sieve and into ziplocks it goes. I'll park it in the freezer downstairs and be all impressed with myself later on when I need a quick meal and can thaw out a bag of my own homegrown, homemade spaghetti sauce. I really wish they'd tell us how easy this kind of stuff is. The jam was a snap. The sauce was two snaps. I'm thinking the grape jelly I'm planning on this fall won't be a major chore either. Trickier than jam because the juice must be extracted and then cooked, but damn! All these years I assumed anything I bought at Shoprite was beyond my capacity to make at home. It's like when I learned to crochet. A couple of lessons, a little trial and error and then POW! I had afghans! And scarves! And purses! And mittens! And funky Rasta hats! I moved on to steel hook and covered my house with doilies. Somewhere downstairs in one of the trunks o' yarn there's a half finished bathroom rug. Who knew I could make a rug? Not me. Over the last couple of years I've learned I'm capable of so much more than I ever believed. I'm left to helplessly turn to the past and wonder what my life would be like now if I'd been raised to have faith and try things as a kid. If I'd been encouraged and taught. I try not to waste a lot of time on regret. Still, I can't help but wonder. Oh well. Today tomato sauce. Tomorrow the world! Braving new frontiers, ~LA
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