My momma is probably reading the title of this, going, “Oh boy.” She never knows what I may write, but the day we made sauce, we said what a good column this would make.
We have been harvesting food together for years, but I remember when I was a little girl, my mom would be busy in the kitchen, canning tomato sauce by herself. It always smelled so good as it cooked down. She worked so hard on it, but all the work paid off when it came to her famous stromboli. Everyone loved my momma’s homemade stromboli. The sauce is what makes it, and all the extra cheese she puts in. Mom and Dad would have friends over for dinner every now and then, and we usually always had stromboli because everyone loved it. Those were the best days and how I met one of my very best friends. My parents’ friends had kids, so Luke and I had fun playdates. We loved when we got company!
Now here we are decades later, and we have a tomato sauce day together. We both know it’s going to be a lot of work but being together makes it more fun. For years we would have to sift the tomatoes through a sieve. You definitely got an arm workout. A few years ago, we moved up in the world, and my momma got the fruit and veggie strainer attachment that goes on her KitchenAid. This made all the difference in the world! Cut the work in half, so we up the number of tomatoes a bit. The first few years seemed to have their challenges, though, until we got it down.
It had to have been the second year we used it, but we sat together trying to figure out how to put it together. We were all proud when we hooked it up to the KitchenAid, and the corkscrew was spinning inside the cone strainer. My mom decided she would start to strain the tomatoes, and I would continue to cut. After a few minutes, I turned around to see how she was making out, and there was tomato juice everywhere — splattered all over her face, the cabinets, and her clothes. We cracked up and said we didn’t think the year before this was that messy!?
Momma was a trooper. She laughed as she put more tomatoes down the shoot that brought it down through the strainer. Most of it was hitting the bowl, but still, juice was getting everywhere. She literally needed a poncho.
At that moment, there was a knock on the door, and it was my mom’s niece Susan Soars. She was actually the one who told mom about this KitchenAid gadget because she had made her sauce with it. It was so much simpler, so she let my mom borrow that first year. I believe Susan hooked it up for her that year and showed us what to do. Year two, Mom bought her own, and that’s when the juice thing happened.
God sent Susan that morning because when she walked in and saw how we had it hooked up and how messy mom was, she giggled and said, “You guys are missing the cover to put over the strainer!” That protects everything from splattering everywhere. We laughed about this all day, and still, every year, say about the year we didn’t have the darn thing hooked up right and had a huge mess. The funniest part is we literally didn’t know it wasn’t put together right; we just thought we didn’t remember how messy it was! Mom’s just sitting there flopping maters down the ole shoot with juice splattering all over her face and chest, and we are thinking, this is what you gotta do to sacrifice making homemade tomato sauce!
Our sauce days still have laughs. This year mom spilled salt on the floor, and we had a good laugh about her cheese grater. (Momma, I’ll save you from that story! Haha!) We did three bushels of tomatoes, giving us 47 quarts and 15 pints! We worked tirelessly all day Monday and then some more Tuesday evening to jar up our last batch. Stepdaddy then said he had five more bushels of tomatoes in their garden for us to do, so we joked about that all night too. (Three bushels took forever!)
It’s a lot of work, but there is no one I’d rather harvest our goodies with. It’s such a good feeling going into winter with a freezer full of goods and our cellar filled with homemade canned goods.
Unfortunately, I can’t get you the exact recipe for my momma’s sauce because, over the years, we just throw in this and that. But I can give you her stromboli recipe, and you can see the sauce in the photo. If you make homemade sauce, use it in this recipe! If not, it’s OK! I know homemade sauce is super time-consuming and a labor of love. There are still some good sauces out there, or just buy tomato sauce and doctor it up! Either way, this stromboli is wonderful—one of our family favorites for decades.
Momma’s Homemade Stromboli
Ingredients:
• Frozen loaf of bread dough (unthawed and ready)
• Tomato sauce
• 1 lb. of ham
• 1/2 lb. of pepperoni
• 1/2 lb. provolone cheese
• 1 lb. shredded mozzarella
• Grated Parmesan
Directions:
Preheat the oven to 350° and grease a 9″-x-13″ baking sheet with cooking spray. Place dough on a floured cutting board and work the dough out to cover the sheet pan. Spread as much sauce on the dough as you prefer. Then, layer ham, pepperoni, provolone, and mozzarella. Sprinkle with some parm cheese. Add as much or little meat/cheese as you would like. You can even add salami too. Fold the dough over the meat and tuck the sides under. Bake for 30 minutes or until golden brown. Once it comes out of the oven, momma takes some butter and spreads it over the top of the hot stromboli. Serve with warm tasty sauce.
