Groveland Twp.-Nuns at the Our Lady of Mt. Thabor Monastery believe in prayer and living the simple life and for them, that means canning homemade spaghetti sauce.
This is the 35th year the Catholic Dominican Order nuns have made the sauce.
They say the recipe isn’t a secret. They like the idea of teaching the community how to can tomato sauce.
‘I am the boss of the kitchen,? jokes Sister Mary Martin, 90, but she knows it’s all about teamwork.
Creating a production line is how these five nuns make the 14 quarts of sauce.
‘We select very ripe tomatoes, about 10 pounds of them,? said Sister Anne Mary, Prioress/Mother Superior. ‘People are good to us. We have friends and neighbors who give us produce.?
The first step, they said, is to make sure the 10 pounds of tomatoes are very ripe, so they can be smashed up easily.
They said tomatoes are one of the safest things to can because they have a lot of acid in them. However, if the lid on the mason jar isn’t completely sunken down, they said botulism could occur.
‘We use the spaghetti sauce for all sorts of things,? said Sister Anne Mary. ‘However, because Sister Mary Martin is Italian, she makes the best meatballs ever, so we love making spaghetti and meatballs.?
When the sisters aren’t baking homemade bread, jelly or apple cake, they spend their days meditating, celebrating Mass, studying and praying for people all over the world.
The sisters say the Dominicans celebrated 800 years as an order just last year. ‘We get e-mails from people in Mexico, South America, Sweden, Africa, England, Phillipines and Indonesia asking for prayer,? said Sister Anne Mary. ‘About two years ago, a man from Indonesia asked us to pray for the safety of he and his family during a civil war. As he wrote the e-mail he said he could hear the sound of explosives in the background. We still hear from him and, gratefully, his family is still OK.?