Saying Goodbye to Store-Bought Salsa

Usually in the summer when we produce a good tomato crop, we make salsa and then we can it in quart-sized mason jars using a pressure cooker.  Then we kind of ration it so that it lasts whenever we have tomato crop failure like we did this past summer.  Even when the crop DOESN'T come from our garden, we still love eating salsa.

Tricia learned a new trick that she tried out this weekend.  We all think it was easy, delicious, and a great success.  She bought some tomatillos  at the grocery store.  I had never had much experience with tomatillos.  They are similar to tomatoes, but have a different flavor.  She also added a big tomato, some sliced onions, peppers and several cloves of garlic to a baking pan.  She broiled them all in the oven for 6 minutes and then flipped them over for another 6 minutes.  You can see that the vegetables have roasted.  The skins are blistered.

She cut the stems off, removed the garlic skins, blended it all up and voila!  Salsa Verde!  Doesn't that look great?

We opened a bag of blue corn tortilla chips and in no time at all, the salsa verde was gone!  We found that the salsa was especially delicious while still hot, coming right out of the oven.

We liked it so much, the next morning, we made some more.  We didn't have any more tomatillos, but we put some tomatoes in the oven in their place, along with sliced onions, peppers and cloves of garlic.  After broiling for 6 minutes on each side, they were ready.

Tricia used a slotted spoon to remove the skins from the garlic cloves and the stem from the peppers.  Then she put into a half-gallon sized mason jar.   The steam coming off the hot vegetables collected on the rim of the jar.

With this batch of salsa, I ran outside and picked a nice handful of fresh cilantro growing in the garden. A few cilantro plants came up on their own this year from seeds falling off the plants last year, but not enough.  We'll end up having to plant more cilantro pretty soon to keep up with demand making salsa.

Once it is all in the jar, Tricia got out her stick blender and let it go to work.  The stick blender is a great invention.  We use it for so many things.

After the milking chores were done, Tricia fried a couple of fresh picked country eggs for me and then I poured some fresh, hot salsa over the top of the eggs.

Delicious!  We'll never buy salsa in a jar again.