Roasted Harvest Salsa

The recipe calls for:

• 5 large Roma tomatoes
• 1 jalapeño
• 2 cloves garlic
• 1⁄4 cup onion
• 1 teaspoon salt

In reality, I just use whatever ratio of ingredients I have around. We had quite a variety of tomatoes, so I picked the ones that were in danger of over-ripening. The large green ones will become pasta sauce at a later time.

I like to add one extra ingredient: 2 fingers of cheap scotch. Consume liberally as you work on the salsa.

Start by roasting the tomatoes. While this step isn’t technically necessary, it gives the salsa a delicious smokey flavor. When I was living with Matt we would roast tomatoes by putting them on baking sheets in the oven. While this certainly got the job done, it also filled the apartment with a haze and set off the smoke alarms. Now I prefer to roast on the stove top. Line any pan (preferably cast iron) with aluminum foil, put over medium heat, open a window, and add the tomatoes.

It’s good to turn the tomatoes often so that they char evenly. As they soften some will split. I tried to roast way too many at once. Ideally each tomato will be well charred on every side. I had too many to manage in this batch, so some charred, some split and some just softened.

When the tomatoes are done, cut them into quarters and put them in a food processor. While you can process everything at once, we like to do the tomatoes separately so that we can squeeze them in a cheese cloth to remove excess water.

Next roast the peppers and garlic. It’s important to leave the garlic unpeeled for this step.

In this picture the garlic is done. The peppers could use some more time in the skillet but I got impatient.

When the garlic has cooled, peel it. Cut the stems off the peppers. At this point you can seed them if you want, or just leave the seeds in for more heat. We like to leave the seeds. Add the peppers, garlic and some onion (I used half an onion for this batch) to the food processor. I like chunky salsa, so I pulsed it a few times to get everything cut up, but not pureed. Add the mix to your tomatoes. Add salt and anything else you think might be good. We added a bit of cilantro to our mix.

Mix it up. If you make a small batch of salsa you can put everything in the food processor at once and then this step is unnecessary. In this case, there were so many tomatoes that we had to do them separately.

Enjoy. This salsa is simple and really good. The roasting will make your kitchen smell great for a few days.