If you want to make your salsa taste anything like good salsa, it's got to include copious amounts of lime juice and cilantro.
CILANTRO!!
One of God's great herbal gifts to cooking: it is so very fresh-tasting, and adds a little piquancy and a lot of green delightfulness to your Latin American and East Asian dishes. Did you know it's also called "Chinese Parsley?"
The other day, we picked several kilos of tomatoes from the garden. There were Pink Beefsteaks, Purple Cherokee and a standard red variety whose name we've forgotten. It's heirloom; promise! One pink beefsteak weighed in at 2.25 pounds. You can't convince us that that isn't impressive.
Tomatoes were chopped, onions minced and hot peppers diced. We decided to do a sort of salsa verde with the yellowy German Stripe tomatoes, with some green olives added.
Olives in Salsa: this is a marvelous idea. On our honeymoon, in Portland (MAINE, not the other Portland), we found in a little wine-and-specialty-foods shop a jar of Gin and Green Olive Salsa. Now, we adore olives, salivate over salsa and appreciate a refreshing gin cocktail. Dirty Martinis, of course, rank high on our list of favorites. That said, we had to nab a jar of this stuff.
Olives! Gin! Salsa! Rolled into one... this stuff (whatever else was in it) ended up being far too ridiculously spicy to truly enjoy. Honestly, we tried eating the tiniest dollop on a tortilla chip, and it was still killer! Just to get through the jar, we ended up mixing it with a small block of cream cheese, which barely took down the heat. Disappointed with our inability to enjoy this seemingly wonderful concoction, we chose to make our own (tolerable) salsa with diced-up manzanilla olives in it. Mediterranean and Mexican meet, marvelously.
Pictured below are a straight-up tomato salsa (left: many tomatoes, chile pepper seeds, cilantro, garlic, a little lime juice) and the salsa verde (right: German Stripe tomatoes, jalapeno peppers,olives, cilantro, onion, a lot of lime juice).
We liked the green salsa a bit better, possibly because of the higher ratio of lime and cilantro to tomato. The red one ended up being a bit too juicy. Also, the difference between garlic-in-salsa and onion-in-salsa seems to be that garlic offers a subtle, sweet tang, whereas onion gives more of a bite with crunchiness.
However hard it is to wait to enjoy your fresh, homemade salsa, it is a great idea to let it sit in the fridge for a few days to let all the flavors marry. Do so before serving at a party to really impress your friends!
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