Mr. and Mrs. Armadilloman make Salsa! Recipe and a Photo Tour!

Its that time of the year when the harvest of everyones garden is coming in, the peppers are ripening, people are trying to get rid of the excess tomatoes by the box full. Its time to make salsa!

Here is our basic go-to Salsa recipe. We scale this recipe up 3-4 times to fit our cook pot and add ingredients to taste.

22 Medium tomatoes
3 large red onions
3 large green bell peppers
6 or more jalapenos
1 medium head of garlic
1 can tomato paste
2 cans black beans (optional)
1 package frozen sweet corn (optional)
1/3 cup sugar
1/4 cup salt
1 cup vinegar

Bring to a low boil, stirring. Cook for 45 minutes. Can in a water bath for 5 minutes.

And here is brief photo tour of the fun.

The hardest part of it all is peeling tomatoes and cutting everything up. First thing we do is fill our big salsa pot 1/3 of the way with tomatoes and add the vinegar, salt and sugar. You can just add half the salt and sugar at this stage and then add later after the first taste as needed.

Instead of just red onions, as the recipe calls for, we add sweet onions and our secret ingredient, shallots with a head or two or three of garlic. It all goes into the food processor and chopped up.

Instead of just green peppers we use yellow, red, orange bell peppers, banana peppers, sweet Itallians, basically whatever we find at farmers market or have growing at home. As for hot peppers we mix jalapenos, serranos, habaneros, once again, what ever we have laid our hands on. And we use as many as needed to make the pot just hot tasting enough.

And into the food processor they all go.

Here are all the non tomato ingredients in the kettle (clockwise) black beans, various hot and sweet peppers, various hot and sweet onion, shallots and garlic and sweet corn.

For this batch I ground up a container of cherry tomatoes in our Vitamix blender and add it to the pot.

Canned tomato paste is added as a thickener and to give the salsa a good color.

Bring it all to a low boil and cook for 45-60 minutes. After it has started to boil, the salsa should look like this with a good mix of ingredients. If it looks short of something, I may add more. After the first checks on this batch I added 2 more cans of beans and and another big onion.

Place it all in sterilized canning jars, and into a water bath canner where it boils for 5 minutes.

And here is the beautiful Mrs Armadilloman unloading the canner.

And there you have it. Our couple hours of work yielded 14 pints and 2 quarts of the good stuff.

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