One of the best parts of summer is a summer garden, and a favorite summer garden recipe is summer salsa. The fresh tomatoes, cucumbers, cilantro, peppers, onions, etc. are all foods that are relatively easy to grow in a garden, and combine well to make a spectacular salsa.
Here is a great summer salsa recipe full of fresh from the garden ingredients:
5 large ripe tomatoes
1 jalapeno pepper
1 medium onion
1 cucumber
1 bunch cilantro (or to taste)
salt
lemon juice
Start by washing all of your ingredients thoroughly so that you do not get garden soil in your fresh garden salsa.
For this recipe you need to dice the tomatoes up into small chunks, and put them in your salsa bowl. Keep the chunks about dime size, so that you can still taste the tomato, and get a good bite, but have room for other ingredients to mix in as well.
Take your jalapeno pepper and slice it in half. If you want medium salsa, remove the seeds from half of the pepper. If you want mild salsa, remove all of the seed. If you want the salsa to be hot, leave them all in. use a food processor to dice the jalapeno pepper up really small. If you have other peppers in your garden, or want hotter, or different flavor, feel free to substitute whatever peppers you have. Once diced really tiny, stick in on top of the tomatoes.
Peel your cucumber, and dice it up small, larger than the pepper, but smaller than or the same size as the tomato chunks. Stick that in as well.
Peel off the outer layer of your onion, and dice it small. You want to be able to get a good mix of all the ingredients on each chip, so you don’t want anything chunked too big. A food processor makes this job easy, and helps you not to tear up while dicing onion.
Next, slice your cilantro up, stalks and leaves. Make sure you consider your personal taste for cilantro. If you like a lot, put a lot in, if you don’t don’t.
Next, mix all of the ingredients together, add some salt and lemon juice to taste. Then, stick it in your refrigerator in order to let the flavors of the various fresh garden vegetables mingle. Refrigerate at least thirty minutes, then serve with chips, guacamole, etc.
A fresh garden salsa can be refrigerated, and often the flavor is best if you make it one day in advance to give the various foods a chance to mingle. However, after about three days or so the fresh ingredients will start to wilt, and not taste as good. So, make batches based on how much you need for your use that day, rather than giant batches.
