My favourite thing to do on Saturday is go to the market. Now that I’m working, I don’t always have Saturday mornings off and, at other times of the year, I have other Saturday morning commitments (dog events or book club) but today I leapt out of bed, ran through the shower, and headed off to the market.

One day I’ll remember to take my camera to the market but, until then, you’ll just have to take my word for it that it was PACKED! Lots of fruit available now…plums, peaches, and nectarines primarily with our melon vendor featuring their Ambrosia  melons. Lots of summer squash is available and I saw a couple of vendors selling peppers. As always, there were fresh cut flowers for sale:

We’re just starting to see tomatoes come into the markets and, as is my habit, I bought some heirloom tomatoes from the Watanabe Farms stand and Romas from the Lagorio Farm stand. The heirlooms are for eating fresh and the Romas are for the freezer.

Last year I oven-roasted slices of Roma tomatoes and then froze them or would blanch them to remove the skins, puree them, and then freeze them. There’s nothing in this world like reaching into the freezer in February and bringing out a taste of summer.

Today, the Romas, along with a couple of peppers and some cilantro, were destined for salsa:

Normally, I’d make this salsa with tinned tomatoes but with Romas only 75 cents a pound…

Here’s what goes into the basic salsa:

2 lbs. tomatoes, blanched and peeled
2 small hot peppers (I think the ones I got today were serranos…they weren’t labelled)
garlic powder
salt

Hold the peppers over a flame until they discolour slightly. For example, jalapenos will turn a dull avocado colour. Cut off the stem and, if you like, remove the seeds and pith. Roughly chop.

Puree the tomatoes in batches in the blender. Don’t make them into tomato juice; you want some chunks left in there. In the last batch, add the peppers and puree until chunky.

Stir all the batches together and season with garlic powder and salt. Put in two or three times as much garlic and salt that you think you should. Seriously. For this batch, I used about 2 T of garlic powder and maybe 1/4 cup of salt. Really.

So that’s the basic recipe. I have recently started adding cilantro and sometimes a squeeze of lime when I make this but they’re not necessary for a great salsa.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 19th, 2008 at 1:46 pm and is filed under Food, glorious food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.