Salsa Day — Janet Szabo

I’ve avoided making salsa for years because 1) The husband eats so much of it that I have joked about getting it delivered in 55-gallon drums; and 2) I was never happy with how mine turned out. My friend Smokey stopped by last week and I asked for his advice. Smokey is the father of one of my neighbors and he moved here 10 years ago from California. (He is, however, one of those people who might as well have been born here, because he fits right in.) He comes over every so often to sit on the porch with me and shoot the breeze. Smokey is an excellent cook, gardener, and used to raise livestock. He gave me some ideas to get started and said I should just play around with the spices until I was happy with how it tasted.

After the husband left for work yesterday morning, I got down to business. I chopped onions and garlic. I roasted and chopped Hatch chili peppers. I pulled eight gallon bags of frozen tomatoes out of the freezer and plopped all the tomatoes from one bag into a bowl of warm water, which is a neat trick I picked up from Amy Dingmann of the Farmish Kind of Life podcast. The skins slipped right off.

I do not separate my tomatoes when I freeze them, so the bags are filled with whatever is ripe at the moment. I would say the total was about 1/3 paste tomatoes (Oregon Star, Amish, and Purple Russian), 1/3 Dirty Girl, which are small, but those plants produce abundantly, and 1/3 Cherokee Purple. After chopping them coarsely, I put everything together in my 16-quart stock pot and cooked it down for a bit. I added salt, pepper, some cumin, and a dash of lime juice. I did not add any cilantro—even though I love it and it’s growing out in the garden—because the other three people in my family think it tastes like soap.

[Insert sad face here.]

I tasted the mixture and was pleasantly surprised. I like using the different varieties of tomatoes. The Cherokee Purples, being an heirloom variety, have a nice bite to them, but that’s toned down by the paste tomatoes. The result was 12 quarts of salsa goodness:

It was actually 12-2/3 quarts, so I left the 2/3 of a quart in the fridge and the husband had it on his eggs this morning, as he does every morning. And he had salsa on the meat loaf I made for dinner last night. I wasn’t kidding about the 55-gallon drums.

I always process my tomato sauce and salsa in the pressure canner—salsa, especially, because it’s got onions and chilis in it and I just don’t want to worry. My water bath canner only holds 7 quarts and the All-American holds 14, so it doesn’t take any additional time to pressure can.

Salsa is fairly labor-intensive but also easy to make in large batches. I know I’ll have enough tomatoes to make at least three or four dozen quarts this year, and if I get that much done, I’ll be happy. The husband asked me how much salsa I buy in a year and if I could make our whole supply and I said, “We don’t have that many tomatoes.”

I might make the next batch a bit hotter. Susan gave me some NuMex hot pepper plants and they produced well.

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I have WS today and tomorrow. Elysian took a teaching position in town and is having teacher orientation this week. Being the indulgent neighborhood aunt, I told WS that if he wants to park himself in the husband’s recliner all day and watch TV, that is fine with me, although his mother may have a different idea. We have tickets for a boat cruise on Flathead Lake tomorrow afternoon, so we’ll make a day of it and do lunch, too. The weather is supposed to be nice, with temps in the mid-70s, although it will be colder on the lake.

I’ve got reservations for an overnight stay in Spokane next week. The hotels were all booked—kids are coming back to college—so I found a room in a quiet Airbnb not far from where DD#1 lived when she was in grad school there. It’ll be a quick trip but a much-needed one.