Freezer Ready Salsa

Tomato OVERLOAD!! My Mom recently went to my uncles house and he gave us over 20 lbs of tomatoes and other garden goodies. We knew we weren't going to be able to eat 20 lbs of tomatoes before they went bad. A few years ago I had made freezer salsa so I suggested we do it again. 4.5 hours later we had 6 containers of salsa ready to freeze. Before you panic that it takes 4.5 hours, most of that is the salsa on a low boil on the stove. Read below for the whole recipe.

It's that time of year here where the garden are exploding for the last time of the season. Not only do we have way too many tomatoes but we have peppers and everything under the sun.  So we washed, chopped, and pureed all our garden goodies to create a delicious salsa and tomato sauce.

The only thing we had to go out and buy were limes and onions. We also used all types of peppers, not just the bell peppers, we threw in some banana peppers, and obviously alot of jalapenos.

The longest part of the salsa was letting it simmer for 3 hours. Thankfully my dad was home while we were making this so we left the pots and my mom and I headed out on a long walk and did some things around the house. Two of our pots were salsa then one of the pots we left out the jalapenos and cilantro and made some tomato sauce for our zucchini pasta.

Freezer Ready Salsa

Ingredients

• 20 lbs of tomatoes
• 2 -3 bundles of cilantro 
• 2 large onions
• 1 head (we used about 10-12 cloves) of garlic
• 10 or more jalapenos
• 3 bell peppers
• 5+ banana peppers and other non spice peppers from the garden
• 6 juice of limes
• 2-3 tablespoons of cumin (or more if you like cumin)
  
• 1/4 cup of vinegar
• salt to taste

Directions

• Chop the tomatoes in a food processor (I didn't peel them because that would take way too long.) You can blend them for as long or little as you want depending on how chunky salsa you want. Pour the tomatoes into a pot.
  
• Chop in the food processor the cilantro, onion, garlic, peppers, jalapenos (with seeds). You will have to pre-chop these to get them to puree. Add them to pot with the tomatoes.
  
• Add in cumin, vinegar, and salt and stir.
• Bring to a boil at a low temp and keep at a boil for 3 hours. As it boils the tomato water will raise to the top.
• Using a wire mesh strainer pour the salsa through it to rid all the water.
• We used tupperware and poured the water free salsa into a tupperware. We left about an 1 inch or less of space.
• Make sure you let the salsa cool before putting it into the freezer to avoid condensation.
• Place lids on and freeze.

We kept one salsa out and enjoyed all of our work. I will say it is alot of time and takes some effort. I wouldn't make it if I had to buy all the ingredients, but when you need to figure out something to do with 20 lbs of tomatoes, this is a great use of them. My Dad goes through so much salsa so this was a great use of all of our tomatoes!

Cheers,
Jess