Failure Friday: Homemade Mild Salsa

So I wouldn't call this a complete failure. It's only the second time I've made salsa. It tasted pretty good and we ended up eating most of it! It's a great starter recipe but, it was a little bitter and I feel like it could be a lot better. So I'm going to tell you what we did and maybe you can help us out! :)

This whole ambition of making salsa started with Chandler and I going up to my Aunt and Uncle's for dinner. They had a bunch of extra tomatoes in their garden and asked us to take them off their hands - they had so many that they even made ketchup with them! Apparently it takes a lot to make a little when you do ketchup. So we picked a good bunch of them and headed home.

Then next day was our date night. We went out to dinner and were trying to figure out what to do with the rest of our night. It's hard thinking of new things to do on dates without spending too much money. I'm sure you know the feeling. . . We talked about going to a movie but there weren't any good ones at the dollar theater. Then we remembered our tomatoes! Hey - Cooking together is fun - let's make Salsa!

We called up the master cook, Chandler's dad, and got to it. My father-in-law helped us figure out what to buy since we didn't want to have to go home to find a recipe and come back into town. What we did:


Cut up:
1 white onion
12-14 tomatoes
2 Anaheim peppers
1 jalapeno pepper (seeded)
1 lime (peel it first)

Throw all that into a fry pan with some oil coating the bottom. Let it cook for a couple minutes. It's ready when the onions start turning brown and the skin on the tomatoes starts sagging. Cooking the veggies first is a great way to get better flavor. And fresh warm salsa is always great too!

While it's cooking, you might as well cut up the cilantro. Separate the leaves from the stems and chop it up into small bits. Pull out big stems or else they get stuck in big chunks in your salsa. We added a bit more cilantro than this because we tasted it and decided it wasn't enough. Just test yours and add more if you can't taste it. Better to have too little than too much right?

If you have a food processor, dump all the veggies and cilantro into it and grind it up. Also add about two Tablespoons of white sugar. It works to do this in a blender too but your salsa gets a little smooth. It's a lot chunkier in the food processor, which I like. 

And that was it! Pretty simple if you ask me. And here's what we'd change next time:

• Instead of adding the lime to the veggies and grinding it up with them, we'd just squeeze the juice into it. We felt like it was a little too citrusy.
• We'd use hotter peppers. I know it seems weird to say use hotter peppers than jalapenos, but we would. We thought maybe a little more spice would also mask the bitter taste. We'll try habaneros next time. We were a little too wimpy this time ;)

Got any suggestions for us salsa makers? What do you do to get rid of that bitterness?