The Pizza Chronicles: Part II

Roasted Tomato Sauce

The oven was preheating to 500 degrees, in order to start on the tomato sauce. The tomatoes were coated in olive oil and put on a cookie sheet, shiny and whole. I love roasted tomatoes. They bring back fond memories of Eduardo's house, where Doña Patricia would fill tomatoes with cheese, mushrooms and olives and roast them over the grill for family gatherings. The skin of the tomatoes becomes blistered and soft, making it easy to remove. I like eating the skin, partially because it has a lot of nutrients, but partially because roasted tomato skin has a very satisfying texture and flavour. It becomes slightly sweet, and feels thin, but chewy. Eduardo and I were eating the skin we peeled off the tomatoes the whole time we were preparing them to be used for the sauce.

A note about the cookie sheet you need to use: it's best to use a cookie sheet with the sides lifted, as opposed to a flat one. If you were baking cookies, a flat cookie sheet would be better because the cookies bake more evenly. However, if you're roasting something juicy like tomatoes, you want a cookie sheet that will grab the juice and excess oil that comes out of the tomatoes.

Next came the onions. I guess this must have been a great recipe for me, because I also love cooking onions! I don't like raw onion, but cooked, onions become an entirely different vegetable. I can't help but recite Neruda's Oda a la Cebolla every time I cook onions;

Cebolla

luminosa redoma,

pétalo a pétalo

se formó tu hermosura...

In the saucepan went an entire onion, chopped, garlic and cumin. It smelled glorious. Once the onions became what neruda would call fina pluma de oro, or a fine feather of gold, we blended them with the tomatoes (the christening of our blender! yay!). Now we have enough tomato sauce to last us a loooong time.

Around this time my friend Alex called and said she wasn't going to a meeting she had after all, so she could come by earlier. She had sent me a message the day before saying she was in town and bored as shit. This was good, because we would need help eating this pizza.

To be continued...