One of Our Favorite Things On Chips

My wife is from South Texas and is Hispanic.  I'm from South Louisiana.  We each brought different culinary favorites into the marriage.  She's introduced me to a number of delectable dishes from her culture, and I think she'd say the exact same thing about Cajun food that she had never eaten before.  She grew up on 'Tex-Mex' food, so there are some things from Mexico that she wasn't familiar with.

She learned to cook them, because she likes to try new things, and today, I'll show you something new for both of us that we really enjoy - Roasted Tomatillo Salsita.  Some also call it Salsa Verde.  Many times on Fridays we'll sit out on the patio and eat chips and salsa.  I'm ashamed to report that we will sometimes finish an entire bag of chips along with the salsa and that will be our supper.  It's so good!

 Tomatillos are also called Mexican husk tomatoes.  They are green and are surrounded by a papery husk.  I got some seeds and planted them and have had mixed results.  They grow and the plants get large and are covered with blooms, but we don't always get a crop.  I'm thinking that they might not be accustomed to our growing zone.  Fortunately, we harvested some and made Roasted Tomatillo Salsa with items fresh from the garden, except for the garlic.  Let's do this.

You'll need some onions.  This time we used Creole Red Onions.  Add some garlic cloves and peppers to your liking.  We used a nice Anaheim.  We took the husks off the tomatillos and put it all in a cast iron skillet.

We'll then roast the entire skillet in the oven until everything is a little charred.  During this process the kitchen smells amazing.

We simply put all the hot vegetables into a wide mouth mason jar, also adding a huge handful of fresh cilantro and a teaspoon kosher salt.  We like to do this right out of the oven.  This dish can be eaten hot or cold, but we enjoy it hot.

She uses a stick blender to blend (puree) everything together.

It doesn't take long at all until you've got a mouth-watering concoction that looks just like this.

We pour the entire thing into a pottery bowl and bring it and the bag of chips to the patio.

Here's a chip with fresh, hot, delicious roasted tomatillo salsita!

It is hard to imagine or explain how fast the bag of chips and bowl of salsita disappears!  It's become one of our favorite Friday afternoon snacks.  Note to self:  Grow more tomatillos.

A Second Try on a New Crop

Have you ever tried a new venture, a new recipe, a new crop only to fall flat on your face?  Have no fear!  I collect quotes like some folks collect stamps.  I read a quote by an unknown individual that says, "When times get hard, remember that the definition of success is falling down six times and getting up seven."

With that in mind to set the table, so to speak.  Let me tell you about a new crop I tried to plant.  Tomatillos.  After Tricia began making Salsa Verde using tomatillos, we liked it so much, I decided that we would grow them.  I didn't grow up eating this strange fruit and neither did Tricia.  I ordered some tomatillo seeds and planted them.  The three plants grew to a height of about 3 feet tall!  They filled with blooms!  The honeybees flew from flower to flower. We waited for fruit to set.

And waited.  And waited...

We produced exactly 0 tomatillos.  I was about to toss the tomatillo seeds into the compost pile when I decided to do some research.  What I learned was that there are three issues that cause tomatillos not to set fruit.

#1    Low Sunlight:    this is not the case.  Our tomatillos were in direct sunlight the entire day.

#2    Excess Fertilizer:    this is not the case.  I applied NO fertilizer to the plants.

#3    High Humidity:    winner, winner chicken dinner!

Armed with this information, I decided that 2023 would be the year we would try again.  I would plant EARLY, hoping to get the plants well established, blooming, and setting fruit before the months of high humidity set in.

And lo and behold!:

Tomatillos sort of look like a greenish-yellow tomato, but with a husk on it.  We picked a basket full of them:

The flesh is firm.  It is bigger than a cherry tomato, but smaller than a slicing tomato.  For comparison, I would say it is slightly larger than a golf ball.

Using the recipe Shown here in a previous blog post Tricia mixed up a batch of salsa verde with our (successfully grown) tomatillos.  Here's what it looked like:

The oven roasted tomatillos, garlic, onions, jalapenos and cilantro were warm.  Dipping a blue corn tortilla into the salsa, we tried it.

Fantastic!  Thankfully, I read the instructions and found what the problem was prior to throwing out the seeds.  I'm bad about jumping into action without reading the instructions.  Now I know, plant the tiny tomatillo seeds very early to get a jump before the humidity spikes.  I'll try to save some seeds to ensure we have more to plant next year.

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.