Homemade salsa!

This week I made and canned some salsa from beautiful organic veggies that I assembled from various sources. I had so many tomatoes and peppers, I wasn't sure what to do with them. Here's an idea of where everything came from:

• Tomatoes (Susie's Garden Patch)
• Green peppers (Susie's Garden Patch and my parents' garden)
• Jalapenos (Susie's Garden Patch and my parents' garden)
• Onions (my CSA)
• Garlic (supermarket)
• Cider vinegar (supermarket)
• Cumin & salt (supermarket)
• Cilantro (supermarket)
  

I canned apple butter this spring, so I was pretty confident of the methods used, but I was less confident in making salsa. Apparently salsa is tricky to can because you have to strike the correct balance of acidity. This is something I was concerned about because a crochet student of mine told me that growing up on a farm, a neighbor's entire family died from botulism in some badly canned foods. Yipes.

So, I went to the same website I used for the apple butter - a website that promotes pick-your-own produce farms, which also happens to use only those canning recipes that are approved by the USDA. I found a good recipe for a zesty salsa and I went to work.

The chopping is what takes the longest time. First, you peel the tomatoes (made easier by boiling, then chilling). Then squeeze out all their juices and drain them. While the tomatoes are draining, you chop everything else. Then you throw it all into a pot and simmer it until (1) the tomatoes are reasonably mashed up, and (2) the mixture is hot enough to can. It wound up looking pretty salsa-y:


About 10-15 minutes before the salsa is ready to can, you have to sterilize your jars. Some people run them through the dishwasher on a high heat setting, which works, but I prefer to just put the jars into the oven at 250-350 degrees for 10-15 minutes. It kills everything in the jars. While those are in the oven, you boil the lids in water on the stovetop. Killing all the bacteria on the jars and lids is important to make sure the food lasts for the full year it's supposed to, and also NO BOTULISM.

Then, you pour the hot salsa into the hot jars, carefully add the lids, and then boil the filled jars in a water bath. In the end, I got some nice-looking salsa jars:


I was a little worried that the lids didn't seal properly, but as they cooled overnight, you could feel that the lids didn't "pop" anymore. (This is similar to a ketchup bottle with a metal lid - the suction pulls the lid down and seals it.)

While I was at a crochet class last night, I had Dave buy two more boxes of jars - it's canning time, baby! I have two pints of salsa that didn't get canned the other night because I ran out of jars, and then I'm also planning on making heaps of salsa, apple butter, and who knows what else this fall. I can't wait to open up delicious-smelling salsa this January, knowing it was totally fresh and farm-picked in August!