Last Batch of Salsa

One of my highest priorities this summer was to preserve as much salsa as I possibly could. Salsa is by far my favorite condiment. I love the zestiness, and it's healthy, because it's pretty much nothing but vegetables. When the tomatoes first became ripe, I would make fresh salsa pretty much everyday. I love it. It tastes like summer itself, but I want to eat salsa all year, so I was going to have to do some canning. It was a lot of work, but anybody can do it. Almost everything going into my salsa came from the garden, with the exception of the vinegar and the salt. Unfortunately, I also had to buy some of the onions. I had a nice little onion crop, but we ate them all before the end of the summer, and salsa calls for a lot of onions. One other minor annoyance is that I planted so much cilantro, but most of it went to seed before I started making the salsa. I was able to salvage some of it, and I had quite a bit of parsley and spicy basil, so I added those to make sure the salsa had some herbal freshness.

I had a salsa recipe, but I only followed it loosely. I generally made it in batches with a base of about 20 pounds of tomatoes, so my recipe was something like this:

• 20 lbs. tomatoes
• 6 onions
• 4 bell peppers (various colors if possible)
• 20 jalapenos (or any chili pepper)
• 1/4 c. kosher salt
• 1 c. vinegar
• 1 c. mixed herbs (cilantro, parsley, and basil)

 I started by coring the tomatoes and putting them in the food processor. I put them in a 12 qt. pot (sometimes I need more than 1 pot) over medium heat, and I repeated the process for the rest of the vegetables. I then added the salt, vinegar, and herbs. After all the ingredients were added I would bring them to a boil, and let it boil for a couple of hours until it got nice and thick. When it got close to being done. I brought the 21 qt. canning pot to a boil. I then added the salsa to some clean qt. jars; added the lids; and submerged them in the canning pot for about 45 minutes. After 45 minutes, I got them out, and let them cool while the seal formed. I ended up making over 20 qts. Now they're up on the top shelf with the other preserves. Dwindling faster than I would like them to.

Fresh Pressed Cider

It's not even fall, and I've already had an opportunity to put my new hand-built cider press to work. My dad knows a manager of an orchard, and he let us go and pick a few bushels worth of McIntosh drops. Ideally, cider comes from a mix of apples, but it's fine to do it with whatever is available. I didn't have a bushel basket, so I don't know exactly how many we got. I do know that a five gallon pale filled with apples yielded about one gallon of cider. From the apples we picked, I got about six gallons. I'm turning five of the gallons into a sparkling hard cider, and we just drank the other gallon. It was a lot of work to get six gallons of cider with the cider press. The bulk of the work consists of chopping the apples before they go into the press. I was using a food processor, but it still took three or four hours to get everything pressed into cider. Next year I'll buy a grinder which will greatly expedite the process.

The fresh cider was crisp and tasty. My mom made some cinnamon and sugar doughnuts that went with it excellently. I'm interested to see how my hard cider turns out. With the exception of pressing the apples, it's supposed to be quite a bit easier than brewing beer, but it does take longer. Some people like to make it during the fall, and not drink it until the following year, but a couple of months should be enough. Mine has been in the basement fermenting for about a week now. I took a small risk by not adding campden tablets. They are supposed to kill the natural yeasts, which can possibly add off flavors to the cider. Not all people add them, but most do. I like the idea of going as natural as possible. I did add some champagne yeast, but I'll let the natural yeasts live. If I don't give it a try, I'll never know. I do have some tablets, so I might use them during the next batch. I'll let the yeasts do there job for another week, and then I'll transfer it to a five gallon carboy, where it will set until it clears. After it clears, I'll bottle it in a manner similar to the beer bottling process; Where I dissolve some sugar in boiling water, add it to the cider, and put it in bottles, while the yeasts turn the sugar into CO2.