how to make homemade salsa

Homemade salsa and guacamole with chips is my favorite summer food!!!  This summer I am going to can some salsa to use in the winter.  My recipe comes from my mother(Ottie Mendez) and stepsister(Melinda Mendez).  There was always homemade salsa around in the summer.  Salsa is best with ingredients straight from the garden but I have made it plenty of times with store bought ingredients.  I do not measure anything but add it to taste.  Every batch is slightly different.  Here is what you will need:

A blender

lemon juice:1 little bottle(pictured) or 2 lemons.  You only need an eight of a cup in the blender

salt to taste

tomatoes:roma are best(the little pear shaped ones) but any will do: about 4(large) or 8-10 romas for a blender full

onions: 1 or 2 large yellow

green chili peppers:(serranos are best but this year i am using banana peppers which are very mild and full of flavor- use the medium or hot count for these): for mild use 1-2, medium use 2-3, hot use 3-4. Every chili varies in potency so add 1 at a time and taste test.

cilantro: 1 bunch: two handfuls from the bunch should do

tomatillos(optional-little green looking tomatoes with a dried skin loosely around them). 4- 6 of these-remove the dried skin and cut in halves.  tomatillos just add more flavor to your salsa and make it a little greener(they are most commonly used in chili verde)

The secret to good salsa, besides fresh ingredients, is how long you blend it, how you add it to the blender, and your porportions to each other, of course taste testing is best to suit your personal preferences. This recipe is for making a blender full, cut the recipe in half for a half blender full Here is my process(I will add pics soon):

1. add about 1/8 of cup to the bottom of the blender.

2. cut up serrano chili peppers(for hot salsa) or banana peppers(for great taste but mild). in fourths is fine

3.next cut romas in half (or if using large tomatoes in fourths). At this point i will add half the tomatoes and the onions and then the other half of the tomatoes

4. now grab the bunch of cilantro and just grab at the leafy end and pull off two handfuls, leaving behind the long stems, if you get some of the ends of the stems thats okay.

5. cut the onion(1 if large 2 if small) into quarters and add to blender.

6. add the rest of the tomatoes you already cut up

7. add salt.  I just pour some in, I like my salsa a little saltier so I add about 3-5 tablespoons worth

8.  Now here is the most important step.  how long you blend all of this toegether affects how runny your salsa is, so the chunkier you like it the less you want to blend it.  use the blend button on your blender and run it for 10 seconds or less, if it is not blending the bottom ingredients and is stuck, be sure to turn it off and use a knife to move the ingredients around a little in the blender, that way ingredients at the bottom don't overblend and make the salsa too runny.  Once the blender seems to be blending and not stuck, blend just until the very top ingredients fold into the salsa and stop.  Now stir and check the consistency to see if it's to your liking. The salsa will thicken as it sits and is best if put in the fridge for an hour or two and then served cold.

I hope you give this recipe a try and enjoy some summer salsa this year. 

For an even better snack, make some homemade quacamole and have both with tortilla chips.

summer harvest time!!!!

I have barely caught my breath after moving, before I can even get the pictures on the walls,  its time to start harvesting our summer garden and fruit trees and start canning, making salsa, storing onions and garlic and alot more.  The cool thing is now we have a real cellar under the house to put all this wholesome goodness and keep it longer(post a pic soon)  I have already put our raw honey, which we harvested last year down there and some of the garlic and onions I have already braided(post a pic soon).  In another week we will be harvesting another year's worth of honey(post a pic soon). I have already been making fresh homemade salsa for the past week( I will add some pics and recipe soon) and enjoying summer sandwiches with fresh tomato and onion.  So today the kids and I picked a bunch of peaches, tomatoes, peppers, plums, blackberries, and cherry tomatoes. Now I am no expert in canning and preserving. I have only done a small amount last year. Before then we just ate what we could durring the summer and the rest went to waste.  I was took sick back then, with my chronic illness, to put in the time with everything else going on. But now that I am the healthiest I have been in 7 years and we have enough to work with it is now worth my time and effort to preserve some of this stuff.  I remember as a child spending summers with my family in Texas helping grandmother Jean can peas and harvest from her garden.  But I think I was only seven or eight and of course i didn't retain any of the process.  So I am a real greenie at this stuff, pun intended!  I have had to just google instructions online and refer to the books that came with our pressure canner.  We purchased our pressure cooker and juicer both from www.lehmans.com Check them out, they are from the ammish country and filled with tons of cool items built and used by the ammish, which means lots of non electric items and items used way back when.  Tommorrow will be a homesteading day, I plan to make some cobbler. I already made some two days ago which was fantastic!!  I will also make some salsa, and can some peaches and maybe even some tomatoes. My favorite summer food from our garden is homemade salsa with our very own tomatoes, garlic, onions, cilantro, lemon juice and salt and of course homemade quacamole(no avacadoes on our trees yet)with chips, yuuuuummmmmmmyyy!! I will add to this post some detailed pictures on the process and recipes so check back with this post for updates! In the mean time here are some pictures:

  

Don 't worry thats not pesticides sitting next to the onions.  We are organic in the garden beds.  thats round up for the weeds around the farm.

I failed to mention earlier that none of this would be possible without my gardener of a husband.  He really enjoys gardening all things edible!  He is the one who really is the brains and muscle behind this whole operation.  I just help harvest a little and prep and cook everything. He is also the one that really pushed to start this whole homesteading idea. I was always fascinated by it but probably enver would have done it on my own.  In the past two years we have been able to make drastic improvements with my major medical illness, Charcot-Marie-Tooth and our son's ADHD and chronic sinusitis and allergies by eating out of our garden!!  We make a good team!  I truly appreciate all his hard work!!

Real women drive tractors!!!

So this past week, I learned to do something that was sooooo empowering!!  DRIVE A TRACTOR! The coolest thing about it is I learned to do it by myself, with a little conspiring from my girlfriend Tamara.  We where trying to walk my antique hay rake down the road a few hundred yards to the new house when my husband pulled up and we where laughing at ourselves!  He handed me the key to the tractor and drove away.  So she and I nervously walked over to the tractor and I climbed on.  Long story short I figured it out pretty quick and away we went!  I was sooo excited! I feel like a real farm girl now!  We ended up making about 10 trips hauling on pallets, the last of the big heavy items in the yard.  The empowering part is that now I can move clutter that caleb leaves around any time I want! So if something big and heavy is sitting around looking junky I can organize it!!!  My husband may have something to say about those notions.  And I will probably regret learning to drive it as he may have chores for me to do on it now.  But I like driving and operating a tractor.  One of the best features about the new place is that we have buildings we can store our farm clutter and tools and such instead of having it junk up the yard. That eliminates alot of stress for me. And now being able to move that clutter eliminates even more!!! whhoooo hoooo!!

An Empty Magnificent Shell

Well, its been a little while, but I have been extremely busy.  We are finally in the new house, and what a house it is.  I am posting some pictures below of the house empty right before we started moving stuff in.  My plan is to post some pics, durring the decorating process so you can see improvements a little at a time.  It will take me a while to get this place just the way I want it.  The amazing thing is I truly think this house was meant for us.  Most of our things go perfectly in it and the energy of the home is so much happier and more inviting than the old house. We just feel truly at peace in this home.  Plus, with the property previously in the family a few generations back it just seems meant to be. Enjoy and check back for more pictures as my progress continues...  Once I get settled I will start doing some projects and crafts and will share those as well.  I have some other subjects to post about but am just to busy right now, so check back soon.