I found a recipe on the Ball canning website called Zesty Salsa and I was intrigued. It involved water bath canning, which I was thinking about trying this year, and it also had a smaller half batch recipe that I liked. I am not keen on making huge vats of anything for the first time, so I figured the half batch was the way to go.
My big plan was to try and can this batch of garden salsa as Christmas presents. Bill’s family has a tradition of giving Christmas gifts that are handmade. Since I had some of the major ingredients ready in the garden I figured Salsa may be a neat gift idea.
I headed outside to gather my ingredients. First, I picked a German pink tomato, a few Italian Heirloom tomatoes, and an Amish Paste tomato. I also gathered two jalapeños for a little bit of kick! I ended up using a store bought onion, green pepper, garlic and cilantro.
We have tried unsuccessfully to grow cilantro in our garden, but it always seems to bolt too early in the season, so it was never available when we had tomatoes.
The Salsa:
First, I peeled my tomatoes by dropping them into boiling water for a few seconds, then I cored them.
Next, I set out to start chopping. I skipped the first step of prepping the water canner, it was just too hot outside to be cooking salsa and boiling water. I am really glad I used a yellow pepper as well as a green pepper. In the end my salsa was colorful.
Who knew salsa was so easy to make. I did not even have to measure anything.
I always use my grapefruit spoon to seed my Jalapeños. It seems to work for me. One of these days I can get one of those fancy Jalapeño knives.
I got everything into the pot and started the boil, my Salsa took about 20 minutes to thicken. I ended up adding a few shakes of black pepper and a few shakes of cayenne pepper because we like our salsa medium hot. It was really tasty.
I packed it up in the fridge with a plan to can it when the weather was not so hot. In the end, I packed it into freezer bags and stuck it in the freezer.
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