Victoria's+Expertise+Statement

Victoria Nichio September 10, 2013 EDC 102 Expertise Statement  Around the age of 8 years old, I took the interest of learning how to make pasta sauce from scratch. Something you should know about me is that I come from a family that is very Italian, meaning we grow our own gardens, scream at the top of our lungs in Italian, and make almost everything from scratch (except for meat, but we import it straight from Italy). My Nonna (grandmother), mother, and her three sisters spend a week, every year at the end of August, preparing these tomatoes to be made into sauce. I’ve had the privilege to watch and help them make the sauce since I was 8 years old and could confidently say, at the age of almost 20, I have mastered the making of homemade tomato sauce. I don’t think it can ever be as amazing as my Nonnas, but its close enough and makes me proud because not many people know how to do this, let alone know how to grow a tomato.  The process of making homemade tomato sauce is actually quite simple. I have to say, the key ingredient is having a Nonna straight from Italy…for some reason it always turns out better when she makes it. First you need to know how to grow tomatoes, which is pretty hard. Sometimes diseases and wrong weather get in the way of growing and it becomes a big mess. Once beautiful ripe tomatoes have grown, we pick them and cut them; usually ending up with around 500 tomatoes (we have a big garden). We put the tomatoes in the tomato machine which grinds the tomato and sauce comes out. Then a massive amount of salt is poured over the sauce in a big round bowl. After, we jar the sauce and put at least 2 basil leaves inside. The last step is to boil all the jars that contain the sauce in them and then you have delicious homemade tomato sauce! It’s not a lot of steps but it definitely takes a week to make.  It’s not a hard process, but some people just have trouble getting the flavoring right. My sauce still doesn’t end up as good as my Nonnas and I don’t think it ever will be. It really does take a lot of practice and years to get the sauce just right!