Pick a Pepper!

We stopped by Billy and Rita's on Monday and they gave us more tomatoes and a few peppers! At this point, I had to make some salsa!

As I said earlier, I was a little reluctant to make the salsa since I didn’t want to ruin the delicious tomatoes. I looked up about 10 recipes on salsa and reviewed the ingredients and the process. And then . . . I did it my own way. My big decision was whether to do a “fresh” salsa and just chop all the ingredients or to do a “restaurant style” salsa and cook the salsa mixture. I decided to go with cooking it, since the fresh tomatoes have a ton of juice and I am hoping it will last a little bit longer. We’ll see.

I don’t have an exact recipe for this- I used 8 large fresh tomatoes, 1 yellow onion, 5-6 jalapeño peppers, juice of 1 lemon, 3 garlic cloves, handful of cilantro, teaspoon or so of cumin, tablespoon of chili powder, and salt. I peeled and cored the tomatoes and put them in a large sauce pan until they came to a boil. I put them in the blender until it was fairly smooth. Back into the pot and I added all the other ingredients (except cilantro). I let them mixture cook for about 30 minutes, until all the veggies were soft. Last, I topped it off with the cilantro.




I really thought this was going to be like several other things I have made (like biscuits) from scratch- good, but not worth the effort when the store has plenty of good options. But it was completely delicious and so worth it. I did taste it at one point during the cooking to see if it needed more ingredients- I added salt and more peppers. It’s going to be hard to eat “regular” store-bought salsa now! Although I will say, I think the tomatoes made it great!

E’s Notes:

• You could make this with canned tomatoes- most of the recipes online used canned tomatoes.
• Taste it several times during the process to see what it needs. The peppers will get hotter and more flavorful as all the ingredients meld together.
• I took the seeds out of the peppers- if you want it hotter, leave the seeds in!
• Add ingredients that you like or omit the ones you don’t like (ex. cilantro).