Skipper’s Salsa

An Emily Original
Written By Annika Wallis

23 April, 2020

I am really excited about this post guys! This is one of my favorite things to make for a group, and Annika took some incredible pictures for this one. After you make this, you will never buy store made salsa again. This is super easy, and all you need is a knife, a cutting board, and some vegetables. Why did I start making my own salsa? Well, you guys have already seen my passion for growing tomatoes, so once you have 400 tomatoes (or 4 or 5), you need a good recipe to do something with them……..

Last year for the 4th of July, I had so many tomatoes that I made a large food grade container of salsa to take barbecue hoppin’ around Coronado Island. Even after that, I had so much salsa that I had to take a giant bowl of it into work the next day (I may have caught my boss, the Skipper, dishing out spoonfuls into a bowl to take back to his office………. I guess it was good!).

This recipe can be made one of two ways. 1. you can dice all of the ingredients by hand. 2. You can throw everything into a food processor (you may have to do this in batches). The food processor method will give you a less chunky salsa, but it still will have the same amazing taste as the diced option I am going to cover in this post.

Ingredients

  1. 8 on the vine tomatoes

  2. 1 medium size onion

  3. 2 jalapeno peppers

  4. 1/3 cup of chopped cilantro

  5. 1 lime

  6. 2 Tsps of salt, some extra to taste

Some Assembly Required…

  1. Dice all of the vegetables (see my dicing methods for each vegetable below)

  2. Place all of the vegetables and cilantro in a large bowl (make sure there is enough space left in the bowl so you can stir everything together).

  3. With a hand juicer, juice one half of the lime into the bowl.

  4. Add the two table spoons of salt, and mix all of the ingredients together.

  5. Taste test! grab a chip (my favorite chips are the Tostitos scoops!) and scoop out a bite. You are mainly looking to see if you need a lime or salt boost. You should just taste a hint of the lime, and if I can taste the salt, I let it be. I always just start with a half of a lime, because some limes are juicier than others. It is easy to go overboard with the limes, so work more juice in slowly. For the salt, it’s always good to give it another test once the salsa has been sitting for a little while and has absorbed the first round of salt you put in.

Dicing Your Tomatoes

Tomatoes are pretty easy to cut, you just have to deal with them getting softer as the juice flows out when you are dicing.

  1. Slice the tomato in half lengthwise

  2. Make quarter inch slices across the length of the tomato

  3. Lay each slice flat and slice perpendicular to get your dices (on the core pieces, you may have to make one extra cut). I throw the core pieces into the salsa as well. It adds some extra texture.

The Dreaded Chopped Onion

Alright, I am going to be honest here……… who buys the pre-chopped onions in the produce section of the grocery store (Hand Raised………Me Me Me !!!!) ? I have always had a disdain for chopping onions. I have taken a couple of knife skills classes over the years, and I still hate it. I ended up finding a method I like, which I kind of just figured out on the fly one day (when there were no pre-chopped onions at the grocery store). This is not a PRO chef tip, this is an at home “I hate chopping onions and they make my eyes water” tip! You are not going to get equally sized pieces, but you’ll limit the onion from releasing its juices into your eyes until the pieces are all chopped.

  1. Cut off the two ends of the onion

  2. Peel the outer layer skin off (sometimes I just pull the first layer of the onion off with it to speed the process up)

  3. Place one of your now flat ends on you cutting board, and slice the onion in half.

  4. Place the flat side of one of the halves down on the cutting board, and make quarter inch slices. When I get to the halfway point, I change my non knife hand to hold each end to keep the onion slices together.

  5. Take half of the slices, and place them in a stack, with the widest part on the bottom. Slice in an arch with about 1/8 inch intervals.

  6. Break apart the pieces with you hand, and voila! Easy Diced onions with no crying involved!

  7. Repeat the steps for the remaining half of the onion

Watch Out for the Jalapeno Oil

Every since I got jalapeno juice in my eyes, I now stick to wearing latex free cloves when I am coring/dicing jalapenos. Be careful if you don’t wear them. The oil has the tendency to get under you nails, so even if you finished cutting an hour earlier, there’s still a chance you can rub your eye (not in this post COVID-19 world, of course!) and blind yourself for a couple of minutes.

  1. Cut off the top of the jalapeno

  2. Slice the pepper in half lengthwise

  3. Scrape out the core of the pepper

  4. If you don’t want to include the seeds, pound the half on the cutting board a couple of times to get all of the seeds to fall out.

  5. Slice the half of a pepper in thin slices lengthwise

  6. Group the long slices together, I try to get all of the ends flush together on the side I start dicing on, and make perpendicular cuts down the length of the slices, to obtain some beautiful tiny pieces of jalapeno!

Tie All of Your New Skills Together

Now that you have everything diced and ready to go, head back up to the “Some Assembly Required” section. This is a great recipe to use when you need to do something with tomatoes that you have lying around. Enjoy and let us know what you think! Tonight Annika, Mom, and I are going with some salsa and cocktails on the porch for a much needed social distancing happy hour! Happy Hovering!

Annika Wallis
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