A Look into Making Zesty Salsa

Canning season is here. Well, it's been here, I've just been behind with writing about it. Here I will show you some of the tasty ingredients, and just SOME of the work I put into making my Zesty Salsa.

long hots

I wish I could say that all the produce comes from my garden, but alas it does not. Only the tomatoes do. I haven't perfected the art of growing peppers on a scale large enough to support my canning habits. I don't grow onions period. And I was lazy harvesting my garlic this year (normally I use my own garlic). The chilies, bell peppers and garlic all came from a local farm stand that I tend to frequent this time of year.

bell peppers

On salsa days, I'm chopping veggies like it's my job. I use the Zesty Salsa recipe from Balls Complete Book of Home Preserving. I almost always double the recipe to make it worth my time and effort. Of course, this may not be a good idea to do unless you have a nice big giant pot to put all the ingredients in. Also I've found my 8 cup measuring cup invaluable- filled to the top is 10 cups, give or take.

My least favorite thing is chopping onions. Doubling the recipe involves 10 cups of chopped up onions! It's ridiculous for me, because I'm very sensitive to the onion vapors. One year it was so bad that as I paused standing in the middle of the kitchen all blurry eyed... I heard a faint meow from my cat Simon (who is my shadow). When I looked down at him- his eyes were all watery too! It was one of the cutest and saddest things.

Thankfully I got this awesome food processor for a gift (you know who you are) one year. I discovered that it makes the onion chopping part of salsa making- SO much easier and less tearful. Crying still happens, but not in the volume it once did.

The farm stand had this amazing hardneck garlic. I can't stress enough how awesome hardneck garlic is. Most folks are familiar with garlic as the soft neck variety often sold at most super markets. I've yet to find hardneck sold at the grocery store (at least in New York). It is soooo much easier to work with- all the cloves are the same size so you don't get those tiny annoying cloves toward the center of the head of garlic that are almost not worth the effort of using. The stuff I got from the farm stand was huge.

I don't think I've ever seen cloves this big before. Needless to say, when you are chopping a lot of garlic for something like this crazy doubling of a salsa recipe- big garlic cloves are a real time and sanity saver.

Like I said you need a big pot. I don't know how large this one qualifies as, but I am willing to bet most normal home kitchens wouldn't have a pot this big.

I've been frantically preserving partially because my tomato plants got the late blight pretty badly this year. Usually I have more time than this it seems. My plants are all dead and the fruit are dropping all over the place. On the ground the fruit become molested by various nibbling pests and then the spoilage factor increases. Wish me luck- I've still got a lot of work ahead of me with the tomatoes.

pint of zesty salsa