Julie's Easy Fresh Salsa

Today I am having a super productive day.

I've already:

 replanted a pumpkin vine to save it from drowning
baked four loaves of bread
made pickles
roasted a chicken
washed all the dishes

and it's not even lunch time!

Now, before you get any kind of ennui about my successfully Pinteresting lifestyle I should probably mention that I got up at 7am today and I NEVER get up at 7am. This flurry of activity is my way of coping with all this new found free time and is not my daily life. Unlike Martha, I do not have minions to do the dirty work while I flit around arranging kale greens in vases I made myself out of pulp from egg cartons.

I just don't have my priorities straight.

However, since our floors were delivered this morning (in two loads, an hour apart, so I couldn't just go back to bed in my clothes) I'm pretty productive. Also, I'm SUPPOSED to be packing our books and fragile nick-knacks so I'm procrastinating. Yay!

There are three reasons why I have a garden:

1. To keep me from selling the house on Craigslist out of boredom while I'm on summer vacation. (I've only done that twice.)

2. Pickles

3. Salsa

Now, I grow other stuff just for fun in the garden but I'll also rip it out and throw it into the woods if I get tired of it. I'm SERIOUS about cucumbers, dill, jalapenos and tomatoes though. I need a steady stream of pickles and salsa to get me through the summer.

I've posted this before on other blogs but here's my go-to recipe for salsa. You can make it with grocery store tomatoes in the dead of winter and it'll still be good. If you are making it in the winter use cherry tomatoes. If you're making it in the summer use all the tomatoes that aren't destined to be BLTs.

Julie's Easy Fresh Salsa

previously posted on Let's Blog About You

Ingredients: any kind of fresh tomatoes, a jalapeno, garlic, coarse salt, lime juice and an onion

First add a tablespoon of coarse salt and a glug of lime juice to the bottom of your food processor. Take the lime juice bottle, a can, or something else sturdy, peel off a garlic clove and use the sturdy object to smash the Hell out of the garlic clove so the skins will pop off easily. This is my favorite part.

Chuck as many cloves of garlic as you like into your food processor. I'm Italian so I generally dump in four. Now slice the stem off of the jalapeno and dump that in seeds and all. Add more jalapenos if you want. Just for godsake don't touch your eyes and go wash your hands. Once one my my friends got jalapeno ghost juice in his eye and I laughed at him. About five minutes later I did the same thing. It was awful. He laughed at me so we're even. (If you want it less spicy take the seeds and membrane out of the jalapeno. I use a tiny teaspoon to scrape it out. More spicy? Add more jalapenos. Duh. Do I have to tell you everything?)


Whirr all of that together in the food processor until it's all chopped up. Don't breathe in the jalapeno fumes either.


Now add some of your tomatoes. If you're using normal sized tomatoes add 3. If you're using eyeball sized tomatoes add half the plastic thingy. Whirr these for a few seconds.

Peel an onion and quarter it. Drop that in with the rest of the tomatoes. Whirr it just long enough for the onion to be in reasonable chunks. You don't want big chunks of onion but you don't want to make everything into salsa juice either. Basically, you want it to look like salsa, which I'm sure you've seen before.


Eat a little bit to make sure the salt level is right for you and then put it in the fridge and let everything mingle for as long as you can stand. You can also eat it right away but it's better if it sits. That's it!