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Share your favorites: Readers invited to submit holiday recipes

4 min read
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Jennifer Garofalo

A bounty of garden tomatoes and fresh herbs transformed into a delicious sauce thanks to a recipe clipped from a newspaper food section two decades ago.

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Michael Garofalo

The finished rustic tomato sauce tops linguini.

It was 5 a.m., and there I was in the kitchen coring and chopping what felt like an endless bowl of plump red tomatoes.

Halving them, gently squeezing out seeds and chopping, chopping, chopping before tossing them into the strainer stretched across my sink.

About eight pounds of tomatoes later, I was done. I threw some salt on them, and mixed them around with my hands. They would sit there, draining, while I moved on to chopping onions and garlic, and gathering and preparing fresh thyme, basil and oregano from my fading garden.

I hustled to get everything into the pot so I could let the delicious tomato sauce simmer, as I tried to figure out what I would do with the other 30-odd pounds of tomatoes I had yet to use.

To say we had a bumper crop of tomatoes this year would be an understatement. Our six plants (three German Johnsons and three Cherokee purples) produced like they were 60.

Neighbors who usually stopped to ask me for basil or zucchini (two things we always grow in abundance) instead found themselves bombarded with tomatoes.

No one complained. There’s something wholly special about a garden tomato that’s ripened on the vine to sweet, juicy perfection.

From the end of July through mid-September, we gave away dozens of them.

When our neighbors went on vacation, they asked us to tend to their garden. They specifically requested that we pick any ripe tomatoes and find a use for them so they didn’t rot on the vine. I told her I may wind up setting out a table with a sign that read “free tomatoes” so that the many dog walkers in our neighborhood could take whatever they wanted.

Turns out, I didn’t need to.

When I walked over to pick up a house key, I was greeted by the glorious aroma of simmering tomato sauce that used some of the tomatoes they’d grown.

“You’re more patient than I am,” I told Susan.

While I’m perfectly capable of scoring, blanching, ice bathing and de-skinning tomatoes for sauce, it is way more effort than I’m willing to invest, I said.

“I don’t do any of that either,” she laughed.

She brought out a 22-year-old clipping from a newspaper’s food page. Atop it, she’d written, “great rustic sauce.”

The recipe required none of what I would consider to be any of those traditional sauce-making hardships, plus she told me it freezes well. I was sold.

The clipping reminded me of my mom, who, like my neighbor, has a file of recipes she’s cut from the paper over the years.

Many bear the stains of repeated use, have handwritten notes of substitutions or comments, and some have started to yellow over the decades.

It got me to thinking about how special the food section of a newspaper is, and how many recipes that came from their pages have become family favorites.

In the spirit of that, we want to invite our readers to share their recipes in a special section to be published in the Thanksgiving edition of the Observer-Reporter and Herald-Standard.

What you share can be anything – appetizer, main or side dish, dessert or drink. All we ask is that it be something readers might enjoy making during the upcoming holiday season.

We encourage you, too, to include a photo of your dish or drink so that readers can see what the finished product looks like.

We’ll select a number of recipes to run in our special Thanksgiving Day section, and run others throughout the month of December in our regular Wednesday food section.

Those of us who love to be in the kitchen know the joy of sharing our most cherished recipes. Perhaps one of yours could become a well-used, weathered clipping that’s shared decades later.

Here’s how to participate:

Recipes and photos of the finished dish (a minimum of 1 MB in size) will only be accepted through email at food@observer-reporter.com, today through Wednesday, Nov. 2.

Include your name and town, so we can properly credit you, and please be as specific as possible with your measurements and directions. Recipes must be typed out in the email – photos of recipes will not be accepted.

We can’t wait to see what you submit!

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