It Takes Two To Salsa

In between my two trips to St. George (previous post) I found a moment to get my salsa on.  I guess it was actually more than a moment, 7 hours, but who's counting?  When your having fun time flies.  My canning repertoire consists mainly of jam (freezer), peaches, grape juice, bread and butter pickles, red sauce, salsa and I canned tomatoes last year for the first time.  There is something satisfying about preserving your harvests but I'm no die hard.  I can when I run out of something.  If we don't use it all during the year, I won't can until the next year. Salsa however is one of those things we definitely use up every year.  This didn't use to be the case, but about 3 years ago I got a delicious recipe from my good friend Heidi and I've had to can salsa every year ever since.

This year my other good friend Melissa joined in the fun.  She had acquired quite a few tomatoes and was looking for a good salsa recipe to can.  I let her try mine and she was hooked!  She had to make some herself.  The only problem... she'd never canned anything before and she was nervous to do it alone.  So of course being the very service oriented person that I am ;)  I invited her to can with me and I'd show her the ropes.  It took us all day but that is to be expected when you end up making 4 batches between the two of us.

Here we are with some of JayDee's beautiful tomatoes.

 

 

      They were huge!  This baby is bigger than my hand.         And they are totally ripe even though they are not red.  Remember I live with a horticulturist, so the tomatoes we grow are not found in most backyard gardens.  In fact, out of the 12 tomato plants we planted this year only 3 were red.  Still very delicious and tomato tasting just not your

traditional colors.

  We loved cutting these guys up.  Look at how awesome they look inside - they're marbled.  They are also super meaty with hardly any seeds. They are great for canning.

Melissa struggled with the onions and peppers.  She is super sensitive to onion fumes and she had a bad run in with some hot pepper seeds so she thought if she put on some sunglasses they might block some of the onion potency. I was laughing so hard at her.  There was no way she was getting away without a picture of that.  

P.S. The glasses did not work.  

I ended up taking over the onion and pepper cutting.  

And just an FYI, it's not a good idea to get lazy with jalapeno seeds.  My hands were still burning the next day!

So even after all the dicing, peeling, burning and mess...

 we went home with beautiful jars of satisfaction.

Thanks Melissa!  Hopefully by next year you'll have forgotten about the mishaps and your taste buds will remember the goodness so you'll want to do it again.  :)

Oh and a quick shout out to my mom for the help with the bread and butter pickles this year.  I've only done them once before this year and all I could remember was how long they took.  I needed my mom's motivation to get me started and I was reminded that they really don't take that long at all and they sure are delicious.

These babies are well worth the effort.