Seed'em and Eat



With the help of a slow cooker, well-selected vine-ripened tomatoes can become a version of

classic Tuscan-style spaghetti sauce much more easily than some other cooking styles.  Slow cooking leaves the tomato flavor intact and the house smelling like a little Italian countryside kitchen for hours.  I've had grand plans of garden grown homemade spaghetti sauce before, but time and deer,

two known arch-enemies of fresh slow cooking, have prevented more than one attempt. I thought I'd skip the three-month wait for backyard tomatoes and relied on Festival's own selection, picked ten, brought them home and started up a sauce that begins with sautéed chopped onions and celery, some smashed garlic

a pinch or two of dried oregano, a dash of red wine vinegar and two Tbsps. of white wine from Villa Bellezza. This base stock you toss in the slow cooker.  The remaining bulk is the 8-10 seeded tomatoes.  To seed you can cut each tomato cross-wise in half and squeeze the soft seed tissue right into the sink if the tomato is ultra ripe.  Otherwise cut each into quarters and scoop out the seeds with your fingers.  When you drop the pile of fairly hard tomato skins into the slow cooker, it seems like the sauce will be very clumpy and it scares the home cook because one look at a pile of tomato peels by kids and it could mean a nose-up in reaction and a meal denied.  But the 4-5 hours in the slow cooker breaks those skins down and you can crush them into a food image more appealing.  Another help is that the recipe calls for blending half of the sauce then re-mixing in with the rest of what's left, tossing it in with the spaghetti noodles, fresh chopped basil,

some parseley, and finished off with a pinch of parmesan cheese.  The result is a sauce that you can actually taste each individual ingredient without the addition of sugar, a lot of salt, water, and other stuff that is added in the jar version.

Kid noses stayed steady on the plate, fingers were involved, and the noodles were slurped with fast lips.