Roasted Tomato Salsa

 This past week I looked at the counter where I keep tomatoes and thought, wow, what am I going to do with all of those? Then the CSA box came and I got even more tomatoes!  We are a family that likes salsa, but not in abundance so I knew I needed to find a recipe I could freeze. I found Roasted Tomato Salsa at Myrecipes.com. This is an amazingly easy recipe and very quick considering it involves roasting.  I did alter the recipe slightly based on what I had.

I used 3-3.5 pounds of tomatoes, a mixture of grape, plum and regular tomatoes.  I also used a Garden Salsa hot pepper and a Hungarian Yellow hot pepper in place of the jalapeno.  In future batches, I will use less hot pepper, this turned out quite hot! I would also advise against using grape tomatoes, it was a pain to peel them!  In my situation they had to be used, so it was worth the effort not to waste them.

A couple other changes...I didn't add any tomato juice, I think the combination of tomatoes added to the juice content so it wasn't necessary.  I also had just a few sprigs of cilantro, so since we love basil with our tomatoes, I added some fresh basil.  I did use salt and pepper, but omitted the vinegar.

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Pico de Gallo

The CSA box was very heavy last week, so I knew that I would be busy over the early part of last weekend. The farmer very neatly put a "salsa" bag together including various types of peppers, tomatoes, and onions. We received a bunch of cilantro as well. Since my refrigerator didn't look like it would hold all this good food for long, I decided that I needed to figure out how to reduce the vegetables...and quickly!

I did roast some of the peppers on the stove. While I was doing that the phrase, "depth of flavor" came to mind, so really wanted to use that phrase in the blog. Yep, the roasted peppers gave the pico de gallo a depth of flavor! I roasted them directly on my gas burner. I did have the exhaust fan on, so I'm sure the smell of roasting peppers woke my new next-door neighbors. The smell of roasting peppers smells earthy and like something else not so legal...so we'll see what they thought when I talk to them this weekend!!!

The rest of the ingredients just required some time to chop. I did run the chopped red onion under cold water in a strainer to take a bit of the bit (and subsequent bad breath) out of them. I added a couple grinds each of salt and pepper and a tablespoon or so of canola oil. Some of the peppers were chopped without roasting.

Tasty....I'm sure we'll be done with the huge bowl of good veggies by the end of the weekend. Fortunately, my husband bought a big bag of tortilla chips at the warehouse buying club yesterday, so we should be set to finish this bowl over the weekend!

Yum...tastes like summer!