when life gives you tomatoes

make salsa!

Well, it wasn't life actually, it was my friend's dad.

We've had our first frost already, and for people who do the extreme DIY of food creation and grow their own, that meant emergency harvest of some veggies, and tucking the rest in under a blanket at night.

With no garden, not even a balcony for containers, I am always happy to accept donations of fresh home grown veggies. However, that was a lot of tomatoes, and they were getting pretty ripe, so I decided to use them all up at once. And since I've been craving heat like crazy lately...

Roasted Tomato Salsa

What you need:

• A lovely assortment of fresh ripe tomatoes ... I guess 2 pounds? Maybe 3?
• 5 giant jalapenos
• 1 onion
• 1 whole head of garlic (yes, a whole head)
• 1 lime (2 in the pic, I only used one)
• 1 bunch of cilantro
• oil
• salt

What you gotta do:

I opted to trim the stem parts off the tomatoes. You don't have to if you don't want to.

Preheat your oven to broil and move one of your oven racks up a level or two.

Chop the larger tomatoes in chunks (I did the big ones in quarters and the medium ones in half). Cut the onion into eighths. Cut the stems off the jalapenos, and cut them in half. If you really want to, take out the seeds and whatnot. Peel all the garlics.

Put the garlic, jalapeno, onion and tomatoes into a 9x13 roasting dish.

Drizzle on about 1 tbsp of oil, and toss the veggies in the oil until they're all nicely coated. Use your hands. It's okay. It's only food.

Put the veggies under the broiler.

If you have a decent oven, they should only take 15-20 minutes to be nice and roasty. After that much time, my tiny and apparently weak broiler had started to brown some of the skins, but the onions and jalapenos were still crispy.

I gave everything a stir and popped it back in the oven. It took another 20-25 minutes before everything was getting that nice browned roasty colour and smell.

Time to chop it.

Put the garlic, onion, and jalapenos (I just fished them out with a spoon) into your food processor.

Buzz this up for a few seconds. You don't want it too chopped, but if you don't do this step, by the time the onions and jalapenos are chopped, your tomatoes will be soup.

Drop the tomatoes on top of the pre-chopped stuff.

A few seconds is all it takes.

Now, we need something sour. Roasting the veggies, especially ones with super high sugar contents like onions and tomatoes, caramelizes the sugars and makes everything super sweet. That's where the lime juice comes in. You can use lemon juice or even white vinegar in this step.

This is where you chop and add the cilantro.

You're also going to want a bit of salt. I used about a teaspoon. The amount of salt you add is really dependent on how you plan on eating the salsa. I was planning on scooping it up with chips, so I used a chip as my taster.

If I'd salted the salsa by tasting it on its own, I would have ended up with a much saltier salsa. The salt on the chip makes a big difference.

I got quite a bit of salsa from that little portion of the emergency harvest.

The small containers went into the freezer since I'm not a canner. And a nice big bowl of it went onto my desk with some chips. And now there is cilantro on my statistics homework.

How did your garden grow?

Welcome to May(hem!!!!)

It snowed in Winnipeg yesterday. This kind of stupidity is why people who live north of North Dakota rarely plant anything in their gardens before the May long weekend.

Oh, but that's just the beginning...

Taneasha has sold nearly all of her worldly posessions in preparation for a 2000 mile eastward cross country move and I'm planning on spending the next 2 weeks 2000 miles south of home and as naked as possible.

I've already been here for two days and I've made pork kebabs, tabouli, pita breads (holy crap they worked!), refried beans, dewberry muffins with fresh off the vine dewberries (I have the scratches on my arms to prove it), and there's currently a sweet potato pie in the oven.

I haven't taken a single freaking picture. Yes, I brought my camera. I've just been a little... distracted.

Hey, I'm somewhere warm, there's a fabulous herb and veggie garden out front, horseys in the pasture out back, and a Viking (aka Recipe Guy) in my bed. Well, actually, I'm in his, but still. I think it's a pretty freaking good excuse for not taking pictures. No, you can't have pictures of Recipe Guy in bed.

What you can have pics of is something we made together when he was visiting me in the frozen wasteland that I unfortunately call home (yes, a Viking who lives somewhere warm and visits me in the north, irony, I know). You've already seen part of that meal...

Tex Mex Rice

What you need:

• 1/2 onion
• 1 jalapeno
• 2 cloves garlic
• 1-2 tsp bacon fat
• 1/2 tsp oregano
• 1/2 tsp cayenne
• 1 cup stewed, diced tomatoes
• 1 cup leftover rice

What you gotta do:

Finely dice the onion and jalapeno. Mince the garlic.

Heat the bacon fat in a small pot or deep frying pan over medium heat. Add the onion, garlic, jalapeno, and spices. Stir a lot. You don't want the spices to burn, but you do want to get that onion softening.

Drop in a cup of tomatoes. Yes, I know the tins are never exactly a cup. You can always use a small tin (I think they're usually around a cup and a half) and scale up the rest of the recipe, but I had a big tin so I used a cup and froze the rest in a container.

Give the tomatoes a few minutes to warm up and combine with the other flavours.

Dump in a cup of leftover rice.

If you want to eat right away, all you really need to do is heat it through. But it can definitely tolerate up to about 20 minutes (long enough to heat a pan, get a small steak to medium, and let it rest a bit before you slice it thinly)

All right, there you go. That's the first post of the month of May(hem!!!!). Stick around, things are going to get a little wacky. Taneasha will be eating road food and I'll be showing you how to impress a Southern boy. ;)

Update on Tuesday, May 3, 2011 at 7:33PM by Taneasha

What Seeley actually meant, was that she was posting this lovely Mexican side dish in anticipation of Cinco de Mayo.  We are totally on top of the holidays here.