SALSA

Last weekend i decided to try my hand at canning. I knew that my sister Deena had a good salsa recipe that she had made for quite a few years and i had a garden full of ripe tomatoes just waiting to fill some sort of calling. So a trip to my garden, my neighbors garden and about a dozen phone calls to my sister later i began my first ever journey into the world of canning. The recipe calls for 48 medium tomatoes, that's a lot of tomatoes and it certainly feels that way when you are blanching(a word i didn't know until last weekend)peeling and dicing them all evening while you watch your family play around in front of you. I was convinced it was going to all be worth it just about the time i heard my loving husband yell from the other room "I can't possibly see how this could be worth all that work."
The tomato prep was definitely the roughest for me but never the less not too much work. The next morning i got up with a excitement to start my canning journey. I chopped peppers after peppers and it was going fairly quickly until i hit the onion in the road, holy cow, after about 10 min of crying and wiping my eyes from the onion fumes i decided to take my sisters previous advice and put them into a sink full of water and i ended up cutting them up there too, so much easier. So everything was chopped and put in the food processor and ready to cook. It was going great and i was so excited to get them in the jars and into the water bath(another term that i heard for the first time last week). I got my jars in and out of the boiling pot of water and set them out on the towel to marvel over their beauty....but wait the buttons, oh no the buttons, they were not staying down. Any good caner knows the importance of the concave button and mine were not cooperating. I frantically texted my sister and looked on-line and i really though all hope was lost until.... POP, POP, and with some assistance from me 16 pushed down buttons later and none that popped back up i had finished my first batch of salsa ever! Later in the evening at dinner i did make a speech to thank all that had helped in the making of said salsa and even the dogs got thanked for licking the tomato juice off the cupboards. The salsa is great and even Jake can't get enough of it. It will be a great winter of Jaime's homemade salsa and yes i think i will be going through this wonderfully fun process again next fall, hopefully with a tad less drama though:)

Ready to snack

Verdict...delicious!