A few years back, long before this blog ever came to life, I was reading Molly Wizenberg’s Orangette and came across this post on Marcella Hazan’s Tomato sauce with onion and butter. I’d been searching around for a new Tomato sauce recipe as I was slowly becoming bored of my usual one, there just seemed to be something missing. I was finding myself adding so many extraneous ingredients that the sauce was no longer just a basic tomato sauce and I felt I needed to get back to basics, the way I remembered the tomato sauce of my childhood.
I was fortunate enough to grow up with a mother and father who at the end of each summer would make a trip to the Okanagan Valley in Southern BC, a dry desert region know for some of this provinces best fruit orchards and vineyards, where they would buy the most amazing field tomatoes at the peek of their season. These were the best tomatoes I had every tasted and this was long before you would ever see an heirloom tomato in the produce section of even the fanciest Vancouver markets. I remember on many of these trips to the Okanagan eating these tomatoes like apples with just a little bit of salt and pepper, now if that isn’t uncharacteristic child like behavior I don’t know what is. They were just that perfect that they were even able to challenge a 7 year olds idea of what constitutes a great snack. In all truth I think I was a bit of an odd child where food was concerned. I would pretty much eat anything. Not much has changed.
I have a tendency to have very unseasonal food cravings. I try to keep them under wraps, or at least attempt to control them, but one way or the other they always find a way to crawl out. It can be the dead middle of the hottest summer in the last ten years and 3 months from flu season and I will be trying to stifle an out of control urge for chicken soup with matzah balls.
