Saturday 3 September 2016

Time to Make Salsa!

I have two baskets of Health Kick tomatoes sitting on the counter and there are lots more ripening in the garden.  I don't have a lot of time to spare today because I'm a tester for a new women's shirt pattern, but these tomatoes need to be dealt with.  Vegetable gardening, cooking, sewing - I sound like the quintessential housewife, don't I?  Well don't be fooled!  But I digress.
I have all the ingredients for salsa on hand.  The recipe is on this website.  The only fresh ingredient not from the garden is bell peppers as mine aren't ripe enough yet.
The recipe calls for onions and garlic.  I showed you a quick way to peel garlic on this blog.  Now here's a quicker way to deal with onions.  First quarter the onions through the middle - skin and all.
Now cut the root from middle to skin but not all the way through the skin.  It's now easy to pull the skin off.
Trim off the dried bits from the top.  Your onion is now ready to chop.  I got through 2 cups of chopped onions in record time and not a tear to be had because it was so quick.
Onions and garlic chopped, it was added to my big Maslin pan along with the vinegar, tomato paste and spices.  The oregano was fresh so I added a tablespoon instead of the teaspoon of dried called for in the recipe.
Next, the peppers.  I didn't have quite enough jalapeño peppers as I inadvertently gave away a plant leaving me with only one, so I supplemented it half and half with Hungarian Wax peppers.  And they're hotter than jalapeño peppers.
I needed 3 cups of chopped mild peppers and I used Ancho and Anaheim.  They're the green ones in the basket picture above.  Now I just needed tomatoes.
The tomatoes needed to be peeled and coarsely chopped.  No need to seed as Health Kick has very few seeds.  The quick way to peel tomatoes is to first cut an X on the bottom.  Plunge them in boiling water until the skins come off easily.  The X makes it easier to see when the skin will come off and also makes it easier to peel them.  I dealt with the tomatoes 4 at a time.  While I was peeling one batch another was in boiling water.  The peeled tomatoes went into a bowl for chopping later.  I think that's the fastest I've dealt with tomatoes, too!
In no time I had my 8 cups chopped and into the pot with the rest of the ingredients.  The pot was set to boil and then turned down to simmer.
While I type this, the house is filled with the delicious aroma of salsa!  All that's left is to bottle it.  And think of something to do with the big basket of tomatoes that's still sitting on the counter.

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