Canning Salsa

We’ve never canned salsa before.  We’ve made lots and lots of fresh salsa – actually, not really me, but Trevor – he loves to make it.  Anyways, my mom’s garden grew like crazy (as she said “that miracle growth concoction I bought off of QVC must have actually worked”) so she wanted to can salsa before.  She’d never made it, and I’d only watched Trevor – but we jumped right in.

First, put the kids to work picking tomatos, peppers, etc.  They were promised Happy Meals as payment.

Next wash and prep everything.  We used the food processor a ton.  For the small tomatoes – grape and cherry – we just chucked them in to be chopped.  For the big tomatoes, we boiled them for a couple of minutes then peeled their skin off.  Then they got chopped.  We also threw in various peppers, a couple lemons, and a couple of limes (next time, just lime juice, not the whole lime).

 When canning salsa, it has to be cooked – we used the big roaster thing that you can cook a turkey in – worked perfect and held a ton.  As the tomatoes cooked down, it got pretty watery.  A genius trick to scoop out the water – push a strainer down onto it, then scoop the water from the middle of the strainer – that way you’re for sure only scooping juice.

 Pour into jars, stick them in the pressure cooker and let it do it’s thing.

Yum!!