When life hands you tomatoes...

Make Salsa Fresca!

A coworker brought a huge bowl of tomatoes into work last week.     Normally, I am not a fan of tomatoes.     However, since I am trying to expand my horizons and learn new skills, I took this bowl of tomatoes as a personal challenge.     I brought home the entire bowl.   

We discussed using the tomatoes to make a few jars of pasta sauce. I am also not a fan of pasta so we opted to go for a big batch of salsa.  I looked to a couple of our trusty cookbooks for salsa recipes that could be used with canning.  I did not find quite what I wanted and turned to the trusty Google search.  I started to realize that most of the recipes for salsa that is going to be canned contain large amounts of vinegar or tomato paste.  I wanted to use fresh ingredients and did not want my salsa to taste like ketchup.   I decided to freeze whatever we were not going to eat this week and save the canning for another day. 

I am not very good at following recipes.  I use recipes as suggestions and go with my personal tastes to improve and customize.    I figured out what I wanted in my salsa and we made a trip to the Farmers Market to get the rest of the ingredients we needed.  I was ready to salsa!

Here's what I used.   Measurements are not exact.  Go with what tastes good to you!

Ingredients:

About 35 small Roma Tomatoes: Seeds removed

1 Red Onion

1/2 Yellow Onion (Only because the other half was a little funky looking)  

1 Jalapeno: Seeds removed

1 Green Chile Pepper: Seeds removed

8 Cloves Garlic

A Plethora of Cilantro*

A pinch or 3 of salt

I sliced the ingredients up a little bit then threw all the ingredients in the food processor.   I processed it until we liked the texture and called it salsa.    It was very easy to put together. 

Here's what we got:

Carrie's Salsa Fresca

We enjoyed fresh salsa with dinner tonight.  We have plenty left to have throughout this week, to freeze a little, and to fill a half pint jar to give away.  Yum! 

* Plethora, in this case, means use to your taste. We are cilantro fiends and I added a lot of cilantro to our salsa.    We were shocked recently when a friend told us she did not like cilantro.   We find this unacceptable.