Homemade Canned Spaghetti Marinara Sauce

One year ago today I sat at this same kitchen table and made a pot of pinto beans and cornbread for two dollars and started writing in a blue dollar-bin notebook because I needed somewhere to put the things I was thinking that nobody in this house had the time or the energy to listen to. The notebook from then is in a drawer in my bedroom now, all two hundred pages full from cover to cover. I went through it last night before I started writing this entry. The handwriting on the first page is small and careful and a little frightened. The handwriting on the last page, written about three weeks ago, is bigger and more confident and decidedly less frightened. They are the handwriting of two different people. The girl on the first page was fourteen and was figuring out whether she was allowed to write at all. The girl on the last page was fifteen and was figuring out what to write next.

The green hardcover Mama gave me for my fifteenth birthday is on the kitchen table now and is one-third full. The handwriting in this one is a third person’s handwriting again. The handwriting in this one knows where it is going.

I want to write down what has changed in the year, because the writing-down is the work of the anniversary. A year ago Daddy had been gone twelve months and Cody was sliding and Mama was doing closing shifts six days a week and the household was on the edge of coming apart, and the pinto beans were two dollars, and the kitchen was the only thing I knew how to control.

One year later Daddy is still gone but the absence has stopped being a hole and has become a fact. Cody is sliding in a different direction now — into the GED program at the unit, into the carpentry workshop, into the substance-abuse recovery group, into The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden and a paperback Bible on a small shelf in his cell. Mama is on the new schedule policy at Dollar General with one weekend day off a month and a small raise from the new year and slip-resistant work shoes that she has worn every day since Christmas. The household has not come apart. The household has rearranged itself around the absence and the imprisonment and the work and is, in the rearrangement, becoming a household that I would not have believed possible a year ago.

And the kitchen. The kitchen is the kitchen of a different cook than the one who made the pinto beans. I have, in this year, learned to make biscuits from scratch, and pie crust, and chicken thighs with mushrooms and lemon and herbs, and chicken spaghetti casserole the way Grandma Carol made it, and Salsa Verde Chicken Cheese Enchiladas, and Greek salad dressing, and homemade Twixster cookies, and Five-ingredient peanut butter cookies, and Mississippi pot roast in the slow cooker, and chocolate chip pumpkin bread, and one-hour cinnamon rolls with cream cheese frosting, and stovetop mac and cheese with a real cheese sauce, and Cody’s favorite carnitas, and Christmas dinner from start to finish, and Thanksgiving dinner from start to finish, and a chocolate chocolate chip cake for my mama’s thirty-ninth birthday, and homemade egg noodles, and the cider-and-sage-glazed turkey breast that fed sixty Baptists on Saturday afternoon. The list of techniques in the back of the green notebook has thirty-one entries now. The list of recipes I have made and starred has eighty-four. The math column at the back has more than two hundred receipts logged. I am writing in pen now. I have, somewhere along the way, become a cook.

And so the project for the anniversary had to be the kind of project that marked the becoming. The project that says I am taking my pantry into my own hands. The project I picked was canning my own marinara sauce.

I want to walk through it because canning is a kind of cooking I had never done before and that I want to keep doing for the rest of my life. The recipe is from Mel’s Kitchen Cafe, the homemade canned spaghetti marinara, which uses about eight pounds of Roma tomatoes per twelve-jar batch.

The math first. I went to the Tulsa Farmers Market on Saturday morning at seven a.m. before the visit. The market opens at eight in March and the restaurant-pack flats of seconds (the slightly bruised tomatoes that the market sellers do not put out for retail customers but will sell at a discount for a flat) come out around seven-thirty. I bought one twenty-pound flat of Roma seconds for five dollars, which is a price I would not have believed if I had not paid it. The seconds had small soft spots and minor bruises but were perfect for cooking down. Twelve pint jars of the Ball brand from Walmart, $14.99 for the case (jars, lids, and rings included). A whole head of garlic from the kitchen, free. A handful of fresh basil from the windowsill plant, free. A tablespoon of sugar from the bag, free. Salt from the rack, free. A bottle of cheap red wine vinegar from Aldi, $1.49 (used about a third of the bottle, kept the rest). Total project cost: about $21.48.

The yield: twelve pint jars of finished marinara sauce, each holding about sixteen ounces of finished sauce, which gives about a hundred and twenty servings of weeknight pasta sauce stored on the pantry shelf for the next year. The math comes out to about eighteen cents a serving. The Aldi house-brand jar of marinara is $1.79 for fifteen servings, which is twelve cents a serving, marginally cheaper. But the Aldi jar is not what I made. The jar I made was made from real tomatoes I touched myself.

The technique. I cored the tomatoes and rough-chopped them into a large soup pot Saturday afternoon, after the visit. I added eight cloves of smashed garlic, a tablespoon of olive oil, a tablespoon of sugar, two teaspoons of salt, and three tablespoons of red wine vinegar. I simmered the mixture, uncovered, on medium-low heat for two and a half hours, stirring every fifteen minutes, while the tomatoes broke down into a thick rich sauce. The kitchen smelled like every Italian grandmother’s kitchen in every Italian grandmother movie. At the end I tore in a big handful of fresh basil leaves, stirred, simmered five more minutes, took off the heat.

I pureed the sauce with the stick blender Mrs. Henderson gave me. The whole pot went from chunky to smooth in about ninety seconds. I tasted. I added another teaspoon of salt and a small pinch of red pepper flakes for warmth. The sauce was the kind of sauce I would have paid eight dollars for in a jar at a fancy grocery store.

The canning is the part I want to write down because canning is a separate skill from cooking, and I had to learn it from a YouTube video and an old Ball Blue Book Mrs. Henderson lent me from her bookshelf. You sterilize the jars in boiling water for ten minutes. You sterilize the lids in just-simmering water for five minutes (lids should not boil; the heat-activated seal can be damaged). You ladle the hot finished sauce into the hot jars, leaving a half-inch headspace at the top of each jar. You wipe the rims with a clean damp cloth to remove any sauce splashes. You place the lids on top. You screw on the rings — finger-tight only, not tight-tight. You lower the filled jars into a rack inside a large stockpot of boiling water, with at least an inch of water above the lids. You boil for thirty-five minutes for pints. You lift the jars out with a jar lifter (Mrs. Henderson’s, naturally; she has been giving me canning equipment for two months). You set them on a folded dish towel on the counter to cool.

And then you listen.

The lids on a properly sealed canning jar make a small ping sound as they cool and the seal pulls tight. The pings happen over an hour or so as each jar reaches the right temperature differential. I want to write down that I sat at the kitchen table for that hour with my notebook open in front of me, and I counted each ping as it happened, twelve in total. Each ping I marked with a small check mark in the notebook. Each ping was a jar that had sealed correctly, that would keep on the pantry shelf for at least a year, that was now mine.

Twelve jars. Twelve pings. The whole pantry shelf has gone from holding two cans of tomato sauce and a jar of generic marinara to holding twelve pint jars of red glass with my own tomato sauce inside them, made from Roma tomatoes I rough-chopped on my own kitchen counter, on the one-year anniversary of the day I started writing in a notebook.

The ninth Saturday visit was Saturday morning before the canning. Cody was good. He had passed his third GED practice test at 87 percent. The carpentry vocational was going well. The substance-abuse recovery group is the part of the schedule he says he most needs. He is on chapter forty-seven of The Grapes of Wrath. I told him at the table about the canning project. He laughed. He said, Kay, you are turning into our grandmother. Mama, sitting next to me at the table, said, that is the goal, baby. And I am writing it down because it is. It is the goal. It has been the goal since I was fourteen and did not know it.

One year. Twelve jars. Six hundred and thirty-three days remain on the calendar. The notebook is one-third full. The kitchen window is open and the basil plant has eleven new leaves. I am still here. We are still here. The cooking goes on.

The recipe is below, the way Mel’s Kitchen Cafe wrote it. If you are new to canning, watch a video and read a Ball Blue Book before you start — the technique is forgiving but the safety steps matter, especially the headspace and the boiling-water-bath time. The first batch of canned tomatoes you make for yourself is going to feel like a different category of cooking than anything you have done before. There is a reason home canning has been a kitchen ritual for a hundred and thirty years. The pantry shelf full of red glass is the reason. Make twelve jars. Listen for the pings. Some recipes are also one-year markers. This one is one of them.

Prep Time: 10 minutes | Cook Time: 35 minutes | Total Time: 45 minutes | Servings: 4

Ingredients

2 tablespoons olive oil
1/2 medium yellow onion, finely diced
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 can (28 oz) crushed tomatoes
1 can (6 oz) tomato paste
1/2 cup water
1 teaspoon dried basil
1 teaspoon dried oregano
1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
1/2 teaspoon onion powder
1 teaspoon sugar
3/4 teaspoon salt, or to taste
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
Pinch of red pepper flakes (optional)

Instructions

Saute the aromatics. Heat olive oil in a medium saucepan over medium heat. Add the diced onion and cook for 4–5 minutes, stirring occasionally, until softened and translucent. Add the minced garlic and cook for another 60 seconds until fragrant.
Add tomato paste. Stir the tomato paste into the onion and garlic mixture. Cook for 2 minutes, stirring constantly, to caramelize the paste slightly and deepen the flavor.
Build the sauce. Pour in the crushed tomatoes and water. Stir well to combine everything evenly.
Season. Add the basil, oregano, garlic powder, onion powder, sugar, salt, pepper, and red pepper flakes if using. Stir to incorporate.
Simmer. Reduce heat to low and let the sauce simmer uncovered for 25–30 minutes, stirring every 5–10 minutes, until thickened and the flavors have melded together.
Taste and adjust. Before serving, taste the sauce and adjust salt, sugar, or herbs as needed. Use immediately over pasta or chicken parmesan, or allow to cool completely before storing in an airtight container in the refrigerator for up to 5 days.

Nutrition (per serving)

Homemade Canned Spaghetti Marinara Sauce — Twelve Pint Jars for the One-Year Anniversary