Dilly Beans!

 

Salsa Party!!

August 8, 2024

Everyone loves salsa!

And there are so many ways to make it – various degrees of hot or mild (make it all hot, all mild, or a mix of hot and mild peppers), with or without herbs, different colors of tomatoes and peppers, or different kinds of ingredients from the usual. It's a great way to experiment with the summer garden bounty.

With a salsa-making contest event on the horizon from the Knox County Seed Library and the Grow City Teaching Garden, I felt like playing with salsa ingredients. I'm not entering the contest, since I'll be too busy with other event details, but I do feel inspired.

In this blog post, I'm doing a raw salsa (or Salsa Cruda, Salsa Fresco, Pico de Gallo). You can, of course, do cooked salsa, and recently my husband canned a bunch for us to have through the coming year's time. I'm starting with a basic sort of raw salsa, which can have endless variations, and at the end I'll feature a different, fruity one.

My ingredients for this one are: tomatoes, sweet pepper, hot peppers, onions, garlic, parsley, olive oil, lime juice, salt and pepper.

Most of the ingredients – some from Grow City, some from home gardens. One thing I was looking for was a variety of festive colors, which also makes for a very nutritious mix. 

The small, streaked, yellowish tomatoes are Tiger Blush, from the Grow City garden, started from seed saved by one of the seed library members. Various red tomatoes are from the home garden. All the peppers here are from the home garden (sweet banana, hot jalapeno, and hot serrano), though we do have jalapenos in Grow City this year, as well as some yellow Italian sweet bell peppers. There is a red onion from Grow City, and green onions from home (we will be using both the white and green parts.) The garlic clove came from bulbs harvested Grow City in 2023.

Usually we like to use cilantro in our salsa, and in pico de gallo, but we didn't have any at this time at home or in Grow City. So, we are using Italian parsley, which we have at home and at Grow City. That's also a good substitute for those who just don't like the taste of cilantro (some people have a gene that causes cilantro to taste like soap to them.)

We don't have a lime tree at home or a greenhouse in which to grow one, so that's from the grocery store. I love lime in Mexican foods, but you could also use lemon, or some kind of vinegar, for that acidic bite.

I started by cutting up the tomatoes and tossing them into the bowl.

These are seeds from the Tiger Blush tomatoes, which I'll be processing and saving for the seed library. I'm not saving seeds from the red tomatoes. Those came from my husband's tomato rows, where different varieties are near each other. There would need to be more space between varieties to have seeds from fruits that were safe from cross-pollination.

Next I cut up those colorful peppers and toss them in the bowl. Sometimes I might choose to save seeds from certain kinds of peppers. In that case you just scrape out the seeds and spread them on a dish or sheet of waxed paper to dry. You must be sure the pepper is fully ripe, though, so you need to know what color the particular variety turns when fully ripe. Many are red when ripe, though they may go through other color stages.

Then I chop up the onions. I have peeled and chopped the red onion, which was mature and had a dry skin. I cleaned up the green onions and chopped up the white parts and much of the green. Then I peeled and chopped up the large garlic clove.

And here's our fiesta in a bowl – all of the tomatoes, peppers, onions, and garlic!

But, there's a bit more to do...

… chopping the parsley …

...adding some olive oil …

... and juicing a lime (in this case, half a lime) into the bowl.

Here we have all of the ingredients in the bowl, with some salt and pepper dashed on top …

… and then give it a good mix! There we go! Time to get out the chips, or the tacos, or the scrambled eggs, or whatever you'd like to have with the salsa. It perks up and dresses up many kinds of foods.

Now, let's get to something different …

Yes, you can make salsa with fruit! Below, I'm making some with peaches. You could also try mango, or watermelon, or even blueberries – see what tastes good to you! When I do a fruit salsa, I leave out the tomatoes and use the fruit instead, but keep the other ingredients pretty much the same, with some tweaking.

Peach Salsa:

Peel and cut up a nice, juicy, but firm, peach. This one came from my Volunteer Peach Tree which, for the first time, decided to grow a load of peaches.

Here are the peaches mixed with the peppers, onions (I used only the green onion here, as I'd used up the red one), garlic, and parsley. I love how the yellow peppers blend with the color of the peaches, but the other peppers and the parsley add specks of festive red and green.

There are some tiny lime green specks, too. Since the peaches were so juicy I decided that, instead of adding lime juice, I would use lime zest, grating the rind into the salsa. Next, dashes of salt and pepper.

Then, of course, mix it up!!

And I can tell you that both kinds of salsa were absolutely delicious and so fresh-tasting!

We had them on tacos at suppertime:

A feast for the eyes, nose, and palate.

Besides experimenting with fruits, you could use other kinds of ingredients. Try using green tomatoes! Black bean and corn salsa is excellent. Then there are tomatillos, which are related to tomatoes (and peppers) but grow inside a papery husk and taste different from tomatoes. Usually green tomatillos are used for creating Salsa Verde. But there are other colorful varieties of tomatillos, such as yellow and purple. There's nothing like having diversity on your plate – varieties, colors, flavors, textures.

Over the years, my husband and I have collected these “Little” cookbooks, which are by various authors, featuring foods from particular cultures all over the world. They are very nice little references and are good starts to learning to cook foods from different places.

Here are some recipes from inside “A Little Mexican Cookbook” - two salsa recipes, and a bonus guacamole one:

You can see that one is for a spicy hot cooked sauce, and the other is a raw “Salsa Cruda”. In the latter, the ingredients include “bunch fresh coriander, chopped”, which is a sort of misnomer. What they mean is cilantro, which is the leafy part of the plant. The seeds of the same plant are called coriander, and have a different sort of spiciness to them.

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