Homemade Salsa

HERE WE GO!

As promised, and a bit overdue, I'm sharing a recipe of salsa I made for the first time ever. I've never actually made salsa before - my adventures in preserving have mostly been in jams (posted here and here). But this year our garden provided us with an overabundance of tomatoes, so it was TIME to do something about it. After looking around the net for a few simple, but interesting recipe, I stopped at one that I felt would be a) easy to prep and b) easy to modify - I adopted (and tweaked) from the Stop Lookin Get Cookin blog.

And here it finally is!
(Note that I skipped the step of peeling the skins off tomatoes and I did NOT add sugar to the jars before pouring in the cooked salsa, in part because I just forgot, but also because there's enough sugar as it is.) 

Homemade Salsa

Ingredients:

* 5 pounds of tomatoes
* 4 green peppers
* 1 large onion
* some jalapeno or other hot peppers (amount will depend on how spicy you want your salsa to be; I made mine fairly mild so that my 3-year-old could enjoy it)
* 4 tablespoons minced garlic
* 2 tablespoons fresh chopped cilantro (since I didn't have any fresh, I added dried cilantro)
* 1/2 cup vinegar (5% acidity)
* 4 teaspoons salt
* 2 teaspoons of sugar for every pint filled (not added, as I already mentioned - if you do decide to use sugar, put 2 tsp in each jar before filling them with hot salsa)

Directions:
(the original recipe called for blanching tomatoes and skinning them as a first step, which I skipped - I don't feel that it affected the flavour of my salsa in any way)

1. Chop tomatoes into small chunks (as fine or as chunky as you prefer).

2. Cut up the onions and all of your peppers into small chucks/pieces.

3. Put all of the ingredients (except sugar if you're using it) into a large pan and bring to a boil.

4. Once the mixture has boiled, reduce the heat to medium and cook it for approximately 1 hour (eventually, the amount will reduce by about half). Mix it frequently, or it'll burn.








5. Immediately after your salsa is finished its cooking stage, pour it out into sterilized jars (don't forget to sterilize the lids also!) and make sure to leave a little space at the top of the jar.

6. Wipe the rims of the jar with a paper towel to ensure that they are clean and dry. Put lids on jars and seal tightly (but not too tight!). Careful, the jars will become very hot very quickly!.

7. Wait to hear the “pop”, meaning that the jars sealed properly (the hot liquid that you just poured should seal the jars on their own, but if you feel more comfortable, go ahead and use a hot bath for your jars, this will not affect the salsa).

We ate some it immediately and had to exercise our will-power NOT to eat all of the salsa at once!

Cheers,