Homemade Salsa

We've got salsa folks!

We were home this weekend so took a little trip to one of the many local farmer markets to pick up way too many tomatoes (John's sister is making us tomato sauce) and with the extras (and many from our pants) I made some salsa for canning.

Here's the thing... I did this last year (I think I did 2 jars not knowing how much salsa we would use up) and we easily used it all up!  So this year the plan was to do the exact same recipe but perhaps, this time, a full recipe (instead of the half I thought I did last year)

So I figured... I probably posted a link to whatever recipe I used in my blog from last year... the post where I talk about making salsa can be found here and if you read it I only talk about making the salsa and make no mention of the wonderful recipe I had found (also note, the date of that post was December 7th!).

So I searched.  I opened link after link after link.  I could make a number of assumptions about the recipe I used...

1) I felt like maybe it made 5 quarts

2) I don't recall buying chilies for it

3) I would never make salsa that included cilantro 

4) Based on the spices that I currently have in the pantry I assumed I only used the spices I currently have.

5) We don't own a kitchen scale and so I was pretty sure the amounts of veggies in the recipe were measured in cups... not pounds.

In the end I'm fairly confident that I didn't find the exact recipe that I used last year (even though I searched to the 5th page of my google search!)... on to (hopefully) better things! So I ended up going with this recipe.

FUTURE CHRISTINE: WE'VE FIGURED IT OUT FOR NEXT YEAR... CHECK ONE OF YOUR CHURCH COOKBOOKS... THAT'S WHERE YOU'LL FIND THE RECIPE

Ahem... anywho.. It definitely took a looong time to chop up all those veggies (I added extra jalapenos to their suggestion because we weren't sure how spicy ours were - most of them had turned red)

homemade salsa

At this point I left John in charge of the salsa and it got pretty runny so we simmered it for quite a bit longer than the recipe suggested to thicken it up (the recipe I plan to use next year says to add corn starch which we debated on adding this year but didn't)

3 quarts of homemade salsa

You can see that we didn't get close to the 5 and a half quarts the recipe claimed it would make (probably because we simmered it for so long)

John ended up sampling some and said it was spicy... we then looked up when to pick jalapenos and learnt that if picked when just starting to turn red they are at their prime spicy level... whoops.