The last two days have been spent in the car, driving the kids to various sleep-away camps. My butt was tired of sitting and my mind was tired of the monotony of the road, so when I got home today, I decided to make salsa.

I used a recipe from Ball, makers of Mason jars. I halved it, as we still don't have a huge amount of tomatoes.

Before, when I've made fresh salsa to enjoy right away, I've just chopped everything up and mixed it, or even faster, thrown it in the food processor, voila. But when you water-bath can this stuff, you've got to skin the tomatoes and chop everything roughly the same size, all of which takes a good deal of time. I can't say I had fun doing this exactly, but it was satisfying. Especially considering that all the ingredients, besides vinegar and salt, came from our garden.

Cilantro, shallots, garlic, tomatoes, sweet peppers, hot peppers, all from our garden

The other step that was different was cooking the salsa for about ten minutes

But now we've got our first batch of salsa on the canning shelf!

In future, I may search around for different recipes, or try fermented salsa, which folks really seem to like (but does it add a weird kimchi taste?).

Meanwhile, there was a little bit leftover that was too small to can, so we'll have that tonight on our steak. Yum! Tom's official review after trying it with chips: "It has a nice balance of flavor."