Growing up, we ate a lot of ketchup - on french fries, on fish sticks, you name it, we poured ketchup on it. In 1991 something happened, sales of salsa in American households overtook ketchup, and we've never looked back. Today, we don't even have a bottle of ketchup in the house, although there are a few packs of it in the fridge leftover from the few times that we go to fast food restaurants.
When we have a decent tomato crop (we didn't last year), we try to put up some salsa in pint jars. We grow a wide variety of heirloom tomatoes: Black Krim, Cherokee Purple, Pink Brandywine, Organic Rainbow Blend, Black Tomatoes, Creole, Chadwick Cherry, Mortgage Lifter and Black Vernissage. My two favorites are probably Black Krim and Chadwick Cherry. They give us a nice mix of colors and flavors that go well in salsa.
We chopped onions, grated garlic, sliced up a bunch of cilantro and diced jalapenos, anaheims, and hot banana peppers:
We blanch the tomatoes and slice the skins off and cut out the cores.
Here's a big bowl of just blanched tomatoes. You can see the skins are wrinkled and ready to be removed.
All the cut up tomatoes and vegetables are thrown in a big pot.
I wish you could smell this as it starts to cook. We have so much in the pot, we keep a close eye on it as we don't want it boiling over!
We ladle the salsa in the pints with a canning funnel and can the pints of salsa following the canning instructions and then pull them out. We set them on a towel and listen intently for the crisp "POP!" as each one seals. When the last one seals, our job is done. 17 jars for the first batch.
It's beautiful salsa from homegrown ingredients.
How fast will 17 jars disappear?
No comments:
Post a Comment