Another day of canning salsa why buy salsa?

All day yesterday we canned.  I listened to the lids popping. Today we checked the jars, 1/2 of them were superficial. We mulled over what to do and decided to re-heat the content of the jars that didn’t seal and start over with new lids. First half of the morning gone dealing with the do-over. Why buy salsa when making your own is so easy and much more flavorful?

Finally, we were able to move on to new batches. Hubby decided to start the onions today. He didn’t receive a protest from me. I cleaned all the jars that we had just poured the salsa out of. Having worked in food service I learned a long time ago how to make quick work out of chopping onions. When hubby and I got together I passed it on.

How to quickly chop an onion

This works especially well with salsa. First, peel the onion then, with it sitting top or bottom up, slice in half.

Once the onion is sliced in half, lay flat side down.

Slice along the short edge, going across the layers of the onion. You can make slices as wide or as narrow as you prefer.

After slinging across the short side,

rotate to slice across the long side and existing slices. And there you have it,

a quick and easy chopped onion. This cuts down on the tears as well.

De-skinning the tomatoes

Now we’re moving on to skinning the tomatoes. We decided this time to do them all at once and get two batches of salsa going at the same time. With peppers and onions already in the electric roaster, we set about boiling water; dropping tomatoes in until the skins cracked; removing them to cool water and pulling the skins off.

The key to this is to leave them in long enough for the tomatoes to crack on their own. If they are small or Roma’s, it will be necessary to poke with a knife and give them a starting point. Otherwise leaving them in to long will begin to cook the tomatoes and make them mushy, hard to deal with and lose some of the tomato to the skinning process.

Onward to cooking

We cook our salsa until the onions are transparent. Cooking it too long will make for mushy green peppers and risk the skin separating from the green pepper. Next weekend I think we are going to can just tomatoes.