Italian Tomato Press Still Available From Williams-Sonoma

You can still get a press just like I use from Williams-Sonoma.

The price is higher now than when I bought one years ago. I think I paid $25 on sale. So I'm guessing it used to be $29.95 instead of $39.95 now.

I can't recommend one enough if you like fresh tomato sauce as much as I do.

This tool just makes it so easy, as long as you have a large smooth counter top to work on and which you can dampen to make the suction cup grip properly.

You'll also need a large, flat and shallow-rimmed plate-like bowl or server to catch the sauce on the left side, and something like a big latte bowl to catch the pulp in the front.

Wear an apron!  

Easiest Way Ever To Make Fresh Tomato Sauce From Romas

This is the easiest way ever to make fresh tomato sauce from Roma tomatoes:

• Harvest your tomatoes when ripe, wash them carefully and dry them thoroughly.
• Drop the Romas into gallon-size freezer bags, whole. Believe me, you don't have to process your harvest any more than this. And when you have bushels and bushels of Romas to deal with, you'll understand what I'm talking about. You'll keep more of your harvest this way when you can't keep up using the traditional ways of making sauce and freezing, or canning.
• Freeze the tomatoes until you are ready to make sauce. I'm down to my last bag from last year:(
• Freezing naturally "cooks" the tomatoes so that skins and seeds easily separate in the press.
• Thaw a bag of Romas in a large roasting pan on the counter, starting in the morning.
• When thawed after lunch, slice each with a serrated knife and allow the water to drain out during the afternoon.
• Make the sauce before dinner, lifting the tomatoes out of the pan where their water has drained out and placing them into the tomato press.
• After making the sauce from the press, simmer the sauce on the stove in a large sauce pan until heated through while you make the pasta and sausages.
• Reserve any unused sauce in freezable containers.
• Drink the tomato water after straining, over ice with vodka, or add it to your next soup.

h/t Dorothy

We Are Never Happy

"Happiness never lays its finger on its pulse. If we attempt to steal a glimpse of its features it disappears. It is a gleam of unreckoned gold. From the nature of the case, our happiness, such as in its degree it has been, lives in memory. We have not the voice itself; we have only its echo. We are never happy; we can only remember that we were so once."

-- Alexander Smith, "Of Death and the Fear of Dying" in Dreamthorp: A Book of Essays Written in the Country (Edinburgh, 1888), p. 60.

Homemakers Are Still Basically Worth $60K

scrubbin' for the very first time, like a . . .

Yeah right. Tell that to the banker on the mortgage refi application and see how far you get.

Story here, if you can believe it.

In Competent Hands: An American Tradition Since At Least 1936

Curly: Soitently! We're all incompetent.

See him say it here.