Salsa!

This past weekend someone gave us about 25 pounds of vine-ripened tomatoes!  I have never seen so many tomatoes in my life!  I have also never had an opportunity to can anything with tomatoes.  The problem is that we live in Alaska.  Frankly, the tomatoes in the stores here are like cardboard (red cardboard!). You have to grow your own and lots of them to have decent tomatoes.

So with all these tomatoes I decided that I would make salsa and spaghetti sauce!  It took me two full days to get it all done, but now I have two batches of salsa (24 cups) and about 45 cups of spaghetti sauce!  Wow, I am thankful that all that work is done!  Here is the salsa recipe that I found that seemed to work really well. To can it you need to heat up the salsa to about 180 degrees (Fahrenheit) before putting it in jars.  It needs to be water bath canned for about 20 minutes.

Here is the salsa recipe that I used...I got it from this site.

Fresh Cilantro: 1 bunch

Green Onion: 2-3 bunches

Fresh Minced Garlic: 10 cloves

Yellow Onion: 3 medium

Jalapeno Peppers: 5

Lime Juice: 2 Tbs

Salt: 1Tbs

Crushed Red Pepper: 2 tsp

Chili Powder: 2 tsp

Tomato Paste: 6 oz can

Tomato Sauce: 15 oz can

Whole Peeled Tomatoes: (2) 28 oz cans- drained

(or fresh from your garden)

Instructions:

1. Wash and chop all fresh veggies, place in large bowl

2. In a separate bowl, mix spices with tomato paste and sauce until mixed thoroughly.

3. If using fresh tomatoes: remove stem, blanch, peel, core.

4. Dice tomatoes.

5. Stir veggies, spice mixture, and tomatoes until mixed through.

NOTE: This makes a pretty hot salsa. I only used four jalapenos and no crushed red peppers.