My favorite part about Sunday Sauce is the smell at the very beginning. You know when you have fresh sauce going on the stove, and the smell of tomatoes, basil and parsley travels throughout the entire house? When I’m sautéing the fresh onions, garlic, and peppers in hot olive oil, everyone in the house knows my sauce is on.  That is my favorite part, until we all “buon appetite” of course.

Of course, the whole process actually starts much earlier than that.  It starts on a nice late summer/early fall day by going out and picking tomatoes.  My grandfather and I have been going together for years now.  We go to any farm that will allow for people to pick their own tomatoes and we’ll spend a morning out there filling up basket after basket.  Careful to pick the brightest red ones, they’re the ripest.

We get our haul home and start chopping.  My grandfather, the traditionalist, still cuts every tomato into pieces by hand using a knife.  I’m a little more modern. I’ll cut the tomatoes in half and put them in a food processor.  It doesn’t matter really, as long as you get those tomatoes chopped up real nice and put them in a kettle on high heat.  Now stir, stir, stir, and keep stirring some more.  The heat being on high is the best way to cook the tomatoes down but you must be careful to keep stirring or they could burn. Grandpa Pete taught me this.

Now, fresh basil & parsley are added with a pinch salt.  At this point it’s pretty delicious, but far from done.  This is where, traditionally, my grandpa and I will jar the tomatoes.  It’s not really sauce yet- it’s fresh tomatoes, fresh basil, and fresh parsley that if jarred at this precise moment will stay frozen in time- fresh, for up to well over a year.  The reason we jar it at this point is so that year-round we can make fresh sauce.  Months later, pop one of these jars, and it will be just like it was on that late summer/early fall day.  That, in my opinion, is one of the biggest secrets to making great sauce every single Sunday.

Fast forward to when you’ve made the decision to make sauce for the whole family.  We sauté our onions, garlic, and peppers in hot olive oil.  We add our tomato, basil, parsley jar.  Now we sprinkle in a little of this and a little of that (hey, we can’t give EVERY secret away) and we have ourselves a pot of delicious, home grown sauce.  Leave that on the stove for a few hours, add your meatballs & sausage, and you’ve got tasty Sunday Sauce ready for your entire crew.

-Paul Guglielmo