One of the most aggravating moments of my life came when I asked my grandfather for the recipe for his tomato sauce. I can't remember most of the answer, but it started with "first you buy some seeds." The answer then meandered through a half hour's worth of required soil conditions, planting dates, picking dates, what kind of rain you needed, the proper twist of the wrist used when picking the perfect tomatoes... It took him a whole afternoon to finish talking.
I only asked that question once, but I wanted to murder him whenever I thought about the answer. You would have wanted to murder him too; that's why he gave that answer to anyone who asked. My grandfather could be a real prick.
I just got into this myself this year. I started a tomato garden with no actual clue of how I would covert the whole tomatoes into sauce, but luckily my mother (not Italian) used to do this too and lent me her squeezo strainer. It's somewhat more substantial than the example in the story but probably not as robust as the grandfather's. I ended up doing small batches of tomatoes every week during the harvesting season. After about the 3rd or 4th cycle of this I was really sick of the whole thing and pulled up my tomato plants, but in the end it was worth it.
Ah, Italian grandparents. So consistently crazy.
I was just writing a story about one of my first jobs as a dishwasher in an Italian restaurant. We had one of these huge grinder things to churn out cheese for pizza toppings and whatnot. Every night, I had to take it apart and clean it, scraping out all of the internal threads, which were filled with extruded cheese. There was no fast way to do it, and it was one of the worst aspects of working there. (Aside from the owners, the washing of dishes, and getting paid $3.35 an hour.)
I ended up walking out on a Saturday night. But first, I took the dirty grinder, wiped off the outside, and put it away dirty, so all of the cheese would turn to concrete and completely fuck whoever came in at 5AM the next day to make the toppings.