Salsa

Justin's major weakness is chips and salsa. If he has them, he will eat them. Quickly. He gets sad when we come home with a brand new jar of salsa and he has to wait for it to get cold before he can eat it. I'm not kidding.

I had always wanted to try making homemade salsa. However, chopping up all those tomatoes and what not seemed like a lot of work. I convinced myself to give it a try once, and the flavor was super weak. I don't know if I just had a bad recipe or bad tomatoes or what, but I thought that homemade salsa would just forever be out of my reach. Then came Pioneer Woman to the rescue. Although everything she makes looks fantastic, I try to avoid making a lot of it because of the ridiculous amount of butter and heavy cream that goes into everything she makes. Oh, the calories. How bad could salsa be though? There's no butter or cream anywhere in sight, so it should be okay.

While I'm sure salsa made with fresh tomatoes will taste better if you can get the recipe right, this recipe uses canned tomatoes, which means the flavor is consistent every time you make it and can also be made in the winter when fresh tomatoes aren't at their best. I've made some changes to the original recipe to suit our tastes. For one, I'm one of those people who thinks that cilantro tastes like soap, and while I can handle it in small quantities, I kind of gag just thinking about the amount that she uses in the original recipe. Sometimes I will add a little to the recipe, but this time I just used the Mexican (lime & cilantro) Ro-tel tomatoes instead, and that was good enough for me. I also like to substitute other kinds of canned tomatoes in place of the whole tomatoes originally called for. Sometimes we use 2 cans of the fire-roatsted diced tomatoes, and sometimes we use the diced tomatoes with spicy red pepper. They're both good, but it just depends on how much heat we want that day.


Ingredients

28-29 oz canned tomatoes
20 oz Ro-tel tomatoes and chilies
1/4 c diced onion
1 clove garlic, minced
1 lime
1/2 tsp cumin
1/4 - 1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp sugar
1/8 tsp chili powder


Directions

Add undrained tomatoes, Ro-tel, onion, and garlic to a large bowl with a lid. Juice lime into bowl. Add remaining ingredients and stir. Pour mixture into blender and pulse until desired consistency. Pour back into bowl. For chunkier salsa, only pulse 1/4 to 1/2 of mixture in blender, and then stir back into the remaining tomato mixture in bowl. Refrigerate at least 1 hour.


Recipe adapted from Pioneer Woman.