Skinny Italian: Eat It and Enjoy It (19 page)

Ten Easy Steps

Now, for all of my bitching about the hot kitchen and having to fill millions of jars, it’s really easy, really worth it, and it will save you tons of money and time throughout the year. It might look complicated at first (I know boiling a jar for the first time can be scary), but there are just ten super-easy steps. Stick with me and you’ll have hungry guys eating out of the palm of your hand in no time!

Step 1
•
Wash the Jars and Lids

Wash them in hot, soapy water. Easy, right?

Step 2
•
Sanitize the Jars

Fill your boiling water canner (the big pot) halfway with water, and then place your jars (no lids) on the rack inside. Add more water until the jars are covered, and boil over medium-high heat for 10 minutes. Take the jars out and let them dry, but don’t place them anywhere they might get too cold. You’ll use that water again in Step 8 to seal the jars.

Step 3
•
Wash the Tomatoes

Wash all of your tomatoes real nice. Take off the stems and remove any bad spots.

Ten Easy Steps!

Step 4
•
Boil the Tomatoes

Fill a second pot (6 to 8 quarts) with water. Bring it to a boil over high heat. Add your tomatoes and boil them until the skins just start to crack.

Step 5
•
Strain the Tomatoes

Remove the tomatoes from the boiling water and run them under cold water. You can either feed them into the vegetable strainer now, which will remove the skin and seeds with a couple turns of the crank, or use ice water and a knife to skin and cut the tomatoes and remove the seeds. Gather all of your pulp into a big bowl.

Step 6
•
Stuff Your Jars

Take the tomato pulp and scoop it into your jars (this is where the funnel comes in handy). And for goodness sake, use a big spoon to scoop the pulp. If my mother comes in and sees you trying to pour sauce right out of the bowl into that tiny funnel, there’ll be hell to pay! Fill the jars, but leave ½ inch of room at the top. (They call this the “headspace.”)

Step 7
•
Really Stuff Your Jars

Stick a thin spatula into the jar and push the tomatoes toward the center to remove any air bubbles. Do this around the entire jar three or four times. Add some more tomato if you need to and pack it down again. Now stick a big piece of basil into the jar and close it up. Wipe the edges of the jar to remove any spillage, and make sure the dome lid is on the very center with a good grip on the jar. Screw the canning band onto the jar until it won’t move anymore, but not too tight.

Step 8
•
Processing (Boiling) the Jars

Bring the water in your boiling water canner to a simmer (about 180°F), and carefully add your jars (keep them upright and be careful not to tip them!). Make sure the jars are covered with 1 or 2 inches of water. Cover the canner with its lid and bring the whole thing to a rolling boil over medium-high heat. Keep the jars in the steady boil for 20 minutes.

Step 9
•
Removing the Jars

Using the lifting rack or a special jar lifter, remove the jars one at a time from the water and place them on a towel on your counter. The jars are damn hot, so be careful! And try to keep them as straight as possible; no tipping. Leave the jars exactly where they are for 12 hours to cool. Don’t screw with the lids or shake them around or anything. Leave them be.

Step 10
•
Test, Store, Finito!

After the jars have cooled, test each one to make sure it has a solid seal. The dome lids should be slightly concave, sucked into the middle of the jar just a bit. When you push on them, they shouldn’t budge. Unscrew the band and gently pull on the lid. If it stays on, you’ve got a good seal. If it pops off, your jar didn’t seal. It doesn’t mean your sauce is wasted; you just can’t store that jar. Pop it in the fridge and use it in the next couple of days.

Some people take the bands off and store the jars with just the lids, but that looks a little off to me. I like the big thick screwy lid. Just make sure you wipe the edges of the jar and remove any water, so the band won’t rust and make it a chore to open later.

That’s it! You can now store your jars of tomato sauce (or give them as gifts to the Italian-mamma-bes in your town) for up to a year. A cool, dark place is best; your regular pantry will do just fine.

Everything about Italy is art-art-art: from the gorgeous paintings to the beautiful buildings to the amazing fashion designers . . . even flirting is an art form. (Italian men,
ah marone
!) There is also an art to eating in Italy—a certain way of serving, of entertaining, even of chewing your food that makes everything a little slower, a little sexier, and a lot healthier.

The Slow Food Movement

Everything about America is fast: fast food, fast cars, fast women (well, some of them, anyway). Things are so fast now the baby comes before the wedding, and the engagement comes before anyone’s even met the family. We talk fast, we drink fast, I think we even have sex too fast (too soon, with too many people, and then not long enough each time . . . but that’s another book).

Every country knows America is fast, and they love the energy they find when they visit us here, but not every country wants to do things as fast as we do. In 1986, when McDonald’s wanted to open their first restaurant in Italy, the company chose a really sacred place to the Italians: in Rome right next to the
Piazza di Spagna
, the Spanish Steps. It’s one thing to take American fast food to Italy, but to drop it in such a special place did not make people happy. A guy named Carlo Petrini led a protest of locals all holding bowls of penne. (McDonald’s went ahead and opened their restaurant there, and it was their largest franchise in the world at the time. Gross!)

It’s not that McDonald’s is the cause of all the unhealthy eating, but with 31,000 restaurants in 119 countries (they’re even putting one in the Louvre museum in Paris!), unhealthy fast-food options are becoming the only option in a lot of places. There’s a fast-food restaurant on every corner in cities, but it can be hard to find healthy alternatives. Today, none of us has enough time or enough money, so a 99-cent meal seems like a deal. But in the long run, it’s killing us.

Petrini started an international organization called Slow Food to remind everyone about the benefits of slowing down when we eat. (Their logo is so cute; it’s a little gold snail!) Slow Food now has more than 100,000 members in 132 countries (so he beat McDonald’s at something!), and many restaurants now have the Slow Food snail outside their door to let you know they support locally grown food, local cuisine, and the enjoyment of eating it.

I’m all over this cause. I think it’s great. There is nothing more aggravating than taking your family out to eat and feeling rushed. No sir! I want to sit and enjoy being out of my house and eating delicious food cooked by someone else for a change.

I used to work with a girl named Kim who was always running around as if her hair was on fire. She had three kids and was stick thin (I didn’t have any kids yet) and she said her secret was that she “never had time to eat.” She wouldn’t fix herself dinner, she’d just eat the leftovers on her kids’ plates and that kept her thin. I’m all for fitting into those skinny jeans, but not that way. That’s just bad, bad, bad! And sad!

I know a lot of women, though, who eat like this. Whether it’s a crazy house full of kids at dinnertime, or working women eating their lunch while running between meetings. Eating isn’t supposed to be a job, it’s supposed to be a joy.

When he was interviewed by
Time
magazine in 2004, Petrini explained his belief that we should “surely, slowly, fully and without excess, enjoy the pleasures of the senses.” Amen to that!

The Benefits of Slowing Down

Even the doctors and nutritionists are jumping on this “slow down” thing. It’s good for your health because it stops you from overeating. It takes fifteen to twenty minutes for your stomach to let your brain know that you’ve eaten something. If you scarf down too much food too fast, your body will never have to chance to tell you it’s already full.

Eating slowly and enjoying your food can also help boost your metabolism, which is great because a fast metabolism is your skinny jeans’ friend. It seems like the opposite: if you run around, even eating fast, you’re burning calories, and if you sit still to eat slowly, your body will slow down, so you might as well grab and go, right? Not according to the brown trout.

In 2000, the Institute of Biomedical and Life Sciences at the University of Glasgow did this huge experiment with fish and found that when the fish were stressed—which is what you are when you’re running around like a maniac—the stress hormones they released slowed their metabolism down. When they were calm, they had happy hormones and a nice, fast metabolism. It’s true for humans, too. You might lose weight when you’re super stressed, but it’s a temporary, unhealthy weight loss. Our goal is a happy life in which we can eat delicious food and still look fabulous!

Italian Dinner, Family Style

In Italy, eating is traditionally a long, amazing process enjoyed with your friends and family. There’s no grabbing food as you run out the door. When I was growing up, we ate dinner as a family every night, and we still do. I think it’s one of the reasons my kids know how to sit still at a restaurant and behave, because they’ve learned that eating isn’t bounce-off-the-walls time (that’s what they do with their other twenty-two hours a day).