2009
In December 2006 we met Alessandra. She was fed up with the fact that the children of Montenero d'Orcia spent the whole winter only watching television. Some mothers had decided to take action. The municipality made a small room above the Coop in the village available and everyone dragged furniture and equipment to it. Alessandra was the hub of the whole thing and all the children liked to come together. Sem was therefore always invited to come. Climbing, frolicking, tinkering, running: children can do almost anything in Italy.
The friendship with Alessandra grew closer and she initiated me in all kinds of customs of the region. Like the preservation of tomatoes in summer. In 2008 we bought some crates of tomatoes at the Sma and started working with her food processor. The machine jammed and we did not have much stock. There had to be another way. In 2009 we started picking tomatoes ourselves. We got up at dawn and went to the fields (see picture above).
Then we had to pickle. We borrowed a passapomodoro (kind of vegetable centrifuge) from someone and set up a work area in our garage. We had to find out everything. How we were going to sieve the tomatoes - there's a lot of moisture involved - so that the pulp would remain. Stages with buckets, colanders, tablecloths torn into pieces: nothing was too crazy for the ultimate result. We spent a whole day in the garage: washing the tomatoes, passing them through the passapomodoro, collecting them in a bag hung in a bucket and then putting them in jars. For that too we had borrowed something from a friend: large pots with a gas cooker for outside. Those pots - once tightly closed and immersed in water - had to boil for at least 20 minutes to be really tight.
It took hours before the water was boiling and all the pots were ready. And how delicious it was, that home picked, home made tomato sauce.
Over the years we have become more efficient. A separate kitchen was set up under Alessandra's mother's house. We eventually had almost a 'produzione industriale' (production line).
To top it all off, we figured we'd better make the right sauces right away. And so we started making 'pomodoro basilico', 'ragu', 'aglione' and ordinary tomato sauce. In recent years, we have taken our production to a new level: we buy very good tomato sauce and then turn it into sauce. Romanticism is all very well, but standing in the middle of August, sweating over leaking tomatoes, simmering pots and vacuum-cleaning jars, is great for a few moments and then becomes hard work. But it was a beautiful process in which we taught each other a lot. Alessandra is teaching me a lot more. But more about that later.
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