October 18, 2009

Weekend recipe: Salsa!

First off, this is something that my friend Hassan Ibrahim of the desert folk inspired me to make. By making it first, and demonstrating to me that making your own salsa is:
-Tasty
-Quick and easy
-Can be modified however you want and pretty much always comes out good
-Cheap

That’s right, cheap. I got everything I need to make this recipe, plus a bag of chips, for $6, and nothing was even on sale. I did already have the vinegar, though. It makes something like 4 big jars of salsa. Can’t beat that, unless you think that Pace is salsa.

Without further ado:
Hassan’s Salsa, as interpreted by yours truly

Put these ingredients in a food processor (preferable) or blender (not as ideal, but usable) and blend the crap out of them:
5 cloves of garlic
2 tbsp apple cider vinegar
3 medium to large jalepenos
1 medium sized habanero
2 tsp salt

The goal here is to have a lot of tiny chunks, or even a sort of chunky paste, of your chiles and garlic, so that it can flavor the salsa nice and evenly when you blend in the other ingredients.

Now add 10-15 medium sized Roma tomatoes, or whatever tomatoes strike your fancy. You don’t need expensive or exotic tomatoes, though they can be tasty. If you’re using a blender, chop them into large chunks before you throw them in to help speed up the blending process.

Blend in the tomatoes until there aren’t any big chunks floating around.

Now chop up one medium sized onion and 1/4 cup of cilantro (you can do as much or as little cilantro as you want, it’ll be good no matter what) and throw them in. Blend until there are no big onion chunks, and start eating!

Note that you have to keep this in the fridge, it’ll spoil pretty quickly at room temperature. If you like something a little sweeter, you can substitute fresh peaches (or mango) for half of the tomatoes. Go crazy, throw all kinds of different crap in there – it’s hard to go wrong. If you’ve got something especially good, post a comment and I’ll try it.