Homemade Salsa

A couple days ago while attending the first ever MoSo conference here in Saskatoon I took a tumble. I tripped and fell down some stairs. (That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.) Tripping down some stairs is not completely out of the realm of possibilities.  I am quite clumsy and have tripped and fallen down many times in my life.

I had a huge lump on my ankle/foot and ignored it (aside from whining to the rest of my friends about it, of course) and even walked on it for the rest of the night. I went to bed a a decent hour since there was a second conference day coming up and I had already had enough fun for one night.

At 3 a.m. it went sideways. I must have moved around in bed and a really bad pain woke me up.  I tried to stand up and almost fell over from the pain in my foot and I couldn’t put any pressure on it. My poor foot (which I can’t exactly call ‘dainty’ to begin with) was three times the normal size.  No lie.

(If this wasn’t a food blog I might have posted a foot picture right here.  A nasty swollen foot picture.)

An early morning jaunt to the emergency room and a few x-rays later and lucky for me – no break!  Just a pretty serious sprain and some twisted ligaments.  (Note: One week after this injury another x-ray showed that I did in fact crack one of my bones in my foot. I’m now in a super sexy boot cast and on crutches for at least 2 weeks. Now back to my story …) By 5 a.m. we were at home and a couple hours later I was attending day two of the conference and in a horrid mood.  Like, what do you expect, right?

What does this have to do with salsa?  Well, before my tumble I bought all the fresh ingredients to make homemade salsa and there was NOTHING that was getting between me and making that salsa.

I’ve made salsa before. I actually had forgotten that I’d made it before. I don’t remember it being fun. I think it’s because I didn’t own a food processor at the time.

It is dead easy when you have a food pro. Even a maimed idiot (that’s me) can make it. You can make this over a couple days if you’re crippled and can’t put weight on your foot more than a little while at a time.  I did all the chopping and mixing on Saturday and canned/processed the jars on Sunday.  Easy.

 

 

Chopping the tomatoes: I had two different methods for this.  I’d do about 4 tomatoes that were quartered and would pulse them until they were fairly finely chopped.  The juice and all would go into the pot.  The next batch would be two quartered tomatoes and I’d pulse them to a more coarse chunky texture. The first time I made this salsa it did work but once the salsa cooked for a bit, the mixture was a tad runny. If you want the ‘perfect’ chunkiness then I’d say chop your tomatoes by hand. If you’ve got a sprained/fractured food, nobody will be upset with you for using a food processor. That’s something I learned.

Your canning jars and lids: You want your jars hot and sterilized. The dishwasher does a great job of doing the heating/sterilizing of canning jars. I just run the jars through alone in a dishwasher on a short hot cycle while you’re chopping and cooking the salsa. As for size of jar to use, we use large quart-sized jars because, well, Levi eats a lot of salsa and this makes the most sense for us.  Use whatever size of jar you want for your household. The lids should be hot and sterilized too. I fill up a small saucepan with water and bring it to a simmer and toss the lids in right as I’m about to start pouring the salsa into the jars. Use tongs to fish out a lid and place it on the clean rim of the jar and twist on the ring to keep it in place.

I don’t like to cook my salsa on the stove-top for a long time because I think it takes away some of the freshness of the salsa that I love.  It’s going to be processed in the canner too so I’d rather keep the cooking time down.  Mostly you want to get the mixture to a hot enough temperature to put into hot, sterilized jars and into the canner without breaking jars, etc.

So, it sounds pretty simple right? If it’s warm in your kitchen and the thought of stirring salsa mixture on a hot stove or boiling water in a canner sounds like the last thing that you want to do, consider using the burner on the side of your BBQ if you have such a thing.  You’re enjoying it outside and not heating up your house.

Overall I’m really happy with how my salsa turned out.  I’d make a few adjustments for next time – mostly including green peppers in with the red peppers – for color and variety I guess.  It’s not a thick chunky salsa, despite my method for making it such.  After it cooked a bit more I guess the bigger chunks maybe cooked down a bit more than I would have liked.  I could have added more tomato paste but that didn’t quite feel right, so I’ll take a slightly (and I mean very slightly) runny salsa over adding too much tomato paste.

Espero que lo disfruten.