13 Oct 2008 10:42 pm
Salsa!
We spent Saturday evening dancing about the kitchen chopping, slicing, stirring, simmering and canning this year’s batch of fresh salsa. Despite the less than perfect growing conditions and the hailstorm that thumped most of the garden in August, we managed to harvest enough tomatoes for about 7 or 8 litres of salsa. We picked up the extra ingredients on Saturday afternoon and got busy in the kitchen after dinner.
Garden tomatoes and other salsa ingredients
The tomatoes required a fair bit of work to deal with the hail damage. It was easy to see which tomatoes had been high on the vine and upwind! Alyssa helped me with preparing the tomatoes and garlic while Brenda got going on the onions. As is done in the finest salsa production kitchens throughout Mexico, the assistant sous-chef wears the traditional kitty cat costume…
Dave and Alyssa chopping garlic
Once all the cleaning and rough chopping of the ingredients was done, Brenda ran everything through the food processor to get a nice fine, even consistency and into the stockpot it all goes. Notice in the picture below the frying pan with onions and celery on the other burner – that’s for the stuffing. While the salsa making was under way we were also prepping for Thanksgiving dinner. Yep, canning salsa is just not enough for one weekend, we also needed to prepare a turkey with all the fixin’s!
Things are starting to simmer...
While the salsa was simmering on the stove for a couple of hours we got out the jars and seals to get them clean and sterilized. Because we give away and also receive gifts of preserves, jams, jellies and salsa at different times, we never have neatly matched sets of canning jars – it’s always a jumble of different sizes and types! But that doesn’t matter; as in other areas of life, its not the outward appearance but what’s inside that counts!
Alyssa selecting jars for the salsa
By the time all the jars were filled and processed we were quite tired but pleased with the result – 14 jars of fresh salsa. Hopefully enough to last the winter. We are definitely looking forward to the next opportunity for nachos – quite often we have nachos with the kids on a Sunday evening and let them watch America’s Funniest Videos before we get into the busy school week schedule.
The results
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