Salsa for Jamie! aka Himee Escalante

That's right Jamie. Don't think that I've forgotten that your real name is Himee Escalante and you taught calculus to a bunch of no-good misfits. I remember. I. REMEMBER.

Anyway, we have (had) a crapload of tomatoes, and I love salsa. So I made some salsa. I've been making it all summer, and I think I've really got the hang of making some decent salsa! And this time, I even kinda measured so that you know what I'm talking about here.

SO LET'S DO THIS. (By the way, prepare for picture overload. I got a little carried away.)

Start by rinsing all of the herbs - cilantro, parsley, oregano, chives.
I like to fill up a big bowl and just... mix 'em around a bit, letting the dirt and stuff fall off and sink.



Then place them on a napkin to dry, as shown ('cause you definitely needed a picture to visualize what that means, right?)
As you can see, I have quite a bit of cilantro. IT'S BECAUSE I LOVE IT. I use a little bit of parsley just to add more of that "fresh" taste to it. And because I don't want to completely decimate my cilantro plant.

While your herbs are hanging out in NapkingLand, grab that big bowl you used to rinse off your herbs (I hope you disposed of your water by feeding a plant, instead of your sink. Plants like water!), and put into it 1/4 tbs celery seed, 1/4 tbs cumin, 1/4 salt, and a few cranks of freshly ground pepper. Why in the the bottom of the bowl? I'm not sure... That's just the way I do it.

Then you're going to need a medium-sized onion. Yellow or sweet is best I think, but white will do just fine. Or red, for that matter. You don't need to finely chop this sucker, but chop it into small pieces. Also, chop up 3-4 cloves of garlic and toss it in the mix. And now it's tomato time. I used about 4 cups of roughly cut tomatoes of all kinds. I used cherry, heirloom cherry, heirloom roma, yellow pear, orange, moonglow, purple calabash, and... yeah, I think that's it. Check 'em out, they're perdy.



Seriously, a rough chop is fine. I quartered the bigger tomatoes, and just halved the smaller ones. Then give all of your herbs a good chop (again, you don't have to mince this stuff, just a niiiiiice chop) and add it to the mix. For heat, I used 3 serrano chiles. Also, I chopped these up last because I wanted to be sure I could wash my hands and be done getting messy. I've touched my eyeball with pepper residue on my fingers, and hey guess what, IT HURT A LOT. So be careful.
To finish it off, add the juice of one lime. Mmm, lime. THEN BLEND!

I use an "immersion blender", or hand blender, to do this. I like the control of it. But you can do this in the blender or food processor if you like. Just watch it, because your salsa will turn to soup quickfast. I recommend using the pulse option on your blender and roughly stirring it up with a spoon. Get it to the consistency you like, and you're done! You can eat it right then, of course, but it will taste so much better the next day. Also, do a little taste test before you stash it away. You might want a little more salt.

But, overall, it's pretty easy... and it's way better than most of the jarred stuff you get at the store. Viva la freshness!


As a sidenote, I picked one of my anaheim chiles when I was outside gathering herbs, and was going to use it in the salsa. But when I got inside the house I couldn't find it. I figured it just fell out of my pocket somewhere and I'd go find it later. WELL LO AND BEHOLD, I found it! I kid you not, I found it exactly like this, gently nuzzled in between the knobs on the cabinet door in front of the sink. Ridiculous.