Remembering Pompeii with homemade tomato sauce

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I still had some mason jars left over after making jam with Squeaky, so I decided to try my hand at canning tomato sauce next. I adapted a delicious recipe given to me by Chef Hermann Jenny that uses canned tomatoes instead of fresh.

I used San Marzano tomatoes. You can get these at any Italian grocer (I got mine from La Bottega in Byward Market). They are grown and imported all the way from the fertile plains of Mount Vesuvius near Naples, shown in the map below. Pompeii, that famous ancient Roman city buried when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 A.D., is also nearby. It's just a little southwest of where they still grow the tomatoes in San Marzano sul Sarno.

It's strange to think that the same volcanic ash that makes San Marzano tomatoes so special today was also responsible for burying entire cities over 2,000 years ago. That said, San Marzano tomatoes are not native to the region. Coincidentally, just 22 years after archeologists uncovered the remains of Pompeii in 1748, the Kingdom of Peru gave the first San Marzano seeds to the Kingdom of Naples.


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Tomato sauce
makes about 6 and a half cups

drop of olive oil
1/2 cup diced pancetta or bacon
1 onion
4 cloves garlic
2 crushed dried cayenne peppers (or 1 tsp dried)
1 cup olive oil
5 Tbsp tomato paste
2 800-g cans of San Marzano tomatoes
a 1" by 3"piece of parmesan rind or other hard cheese
small hunk of salt pork rind
1/2 Tbsp herbes de Provence
a couple of beef bouillon cubes
1 Tbsp oregano
2 bay leaves
salt and pepper to taste

Saute the pancetta and the onions in the olive oil for about 10 minutes or until soft. Add the garlic and the dried cayenne pepper and saute another minute. Add the tomato paste and stir to make a paste with the other ingredients.

Then add the canned tomatoes and break them apart a bit with your wooden spoon. Add the rest of the ingredients and cover and cook in the oven for three hours at 125 C/250 F.

Discard the salt pork rind and bay leaves. The parmesan rind should easily break up and dissolve into the sauce.

Follow the canning directions that come with your preserving jars, and top each jar with a layer of hot olive oil, about 1/4 of an inch think to sterilize the top layer of sauce.

Alternatively, you can freeze the sauce if you'll be keeping it for more than a few weeks, but in that case, store it in a Tupperware instead of a glass jar.

This is lovely in pasta or pizza, and to spread on toast!

Tomato harvest roundup

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Ah, my little yellow cherry tomatoes, how much do I love thee? Let me count the ways: in salads, on pizza, with burgers and just plain popped into my mouth fresh off the vine.

Over the past few weeks, S and I have found many different ways to eat the cherry tomatoes off our balcony plant. We cut them in half and tossed them in a salad with arugula and toasted almonds. We put them in baguette sandwiches that we took on a road trip to Montreal, and another time to a picnic by the canal. S put them on his pita pizzas, and I tossed them with a bit of olive oil, salt and pepper, as a side salad for my pork-and-beef hamburger patties on pita with raita (plain yogurt with ground cumin and grated cucumbers).


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The best way to eat them, though, is plain off the vine, maybe cut in half, with a little salt and pepper, if you want to maximize their flavour. Sometimes one side of the tomato splits in half and it bursts open a bit. They do that when they are too full of water, but I like to think it's part of their personality that they are literally bursting with sweetness, tempting me to eat them :)

So the tomato experiment was very successful — our one plant produced at least 90 tomatoes in my estimation. I can't wait until next summer, when I can up production with some more plants. Maybe hold some tomato parties ... ah, the possibilities!

What is your favourite way with cherry tomatoes?


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Tomato farming balcony-style

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I have a hard-working cherry tomato plant on my balcony that is currently sporting no less than 87 tomatoes! Most are still green but a few are ripe and a healthy bright yellow. S and I are going to cook these up tonight in the first of what I hope will be many yellow-tomato meals. We just need lots of sun for the rest to ripen, so here's hoping for some more good weather.


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The other plants that are doing well are my thyme and sage. I planted them in a 12-inch pot with mint and rosemary. The rosemary is growing but it's small and a bit overshadowed by the herbs that are doing well. The mint never really got going. So all in all, four out of five plants are thriving, which is nice.

I had a big lavender plant, which I kept in its peat pot with clay soil. It flowered and was fantastic for a while, but now it's dying. Not sure what to do about that. Maybe I should have potted it in real soil. Has anyone ever successfully kept lavender alive on a south-facing balcony?