Summer in a Bottle

With summer marching unswervingly toward its inevitable conclusion, do you ever wish you could bottle it up--all that sunshiny goodness--and save it to release in the cold of winter?

Well, yesterday, I did just that.  I took some ripe tomatoes from my garden, added a few other things, and bottled up some sunshine, otherwise known as salsa, to eat all winter long.  Mmmm, yummy.

And here's how you know I'm not a "professional" blogger.  I forgot to take a picture of all of my ingredients laid out so prettily.  I was too excited to get going...

Anyway, I used this recipe because it seemed really easy and doable compared to some of the other recipes I found.  I halved the recipe because I didn't have enough tomatoes to do the whole thing, and 2 gallons seemed like p l e n t y of salsa to last us a good long time.  In fact, I'm thinking a jar or two of this salsa might just end up in my favorite brother in law's Christmas stocking.

Simmering away...

I peeled my tomatoes using the blanch and shock method (place whole tomatoes in boiling water for 30-60 seconds, then immediately plunge into ice water (the tomatoes, not you)--the skins will peel off easily using your fingers).  The recipe didn't say anything about seeding the tomatoes, but I did end up seeding them--I wasn't fanatical about it or anything, though. 

 

Here's a handy tip for seeding tomatoes.  Cut them through the y-axis, halfway between the stem and blossom end--that way you end up with a cross section through all of the seed cavities and it's easy to just scoop them all out.  You probably all knew that already.  Took me a few tomatoes to figure it out, though.

 

I would recommend using a food processor to chop the vegetables, except for the tomatoes.  Not only is it easier and faster, but you get a nice fine chop that way.

Now...to use up the commercially-prepared salsa that's in the fridge so we can dig in to this yummy stuff!