Homemade Salsa

Yesterday Josh and I went to a newcomer's lunch after church. Free food, and whatnot; it was pretty good. One cool thing about living in a college town like Boston is that on average the general population tends to be more our age and really educated. In the half hour or so we were at the lunch we met three young married couples (well, one was engaged). Of these six people, one was an MIT grad student studying mechanical engineering, one was a Harvard Law alum working at a Boston law firm, one was a Harvard grad student studying architecture, and one was a fourth year med student at I forget where, but I'm thinking it was BU. The wife of the architecture student happened to be a third grade teacher in a classical charter elementary school, which was totally weird because that's almost exactly what I was last year--down to a tee.

Last night I had a huge craving for chips and salsa, but I just hate store-bought salsa, so I figured I'd make my own using the family recipe and post about it on my blog. However. You know the kids TV show SpongeBob SquarePants? When my aunts owned their restaurant in Israel they had a Plankton of their own, so I am unfortunately not allowed to post the family recipe on the interwebs. In the end I decided to try out a different salsa recipe I had found on pinterest (its the only salsa recipe on my Eats board if you want to see the original--you can follow me on pinterest by clicking the link top right), and it turned out fantastic! It comparable to the family recipe in terms of how good it tastes, in my opinion, despite it being quite different. The original recipe on Pinterest makes like 6 cups, so I halved it:

14 oz. can diced tomatoes (peeled) with juice

10 oz. can Rotel (diced tomatoes with green chilies)

1/4 c. chopped onion 

1 clove garlic, chopped

1 jalapeno, quartered and sliced thin

1/2 cup cilantro

Juice from 1/2 a fresh lime 

1/4 tsp. salt

1/4 tsp. granulated sugar

1/4 tsp. cumin

Place all of these ingredients in a food processor and pulse to desired consistency (for me that was about 10 pulses, and I used a Cuisinart). 

That's it! Josh loved it. He and I ate through an entire bag (albeit it was on the smaller side as far as chip bags go) of tortilla chips with this salsa last night. I added a little more onion than it called for (about 2/3 of a medium yellow onion since that's what I had), and a little more garlic (but not much, maybe 2 cloves--I used minced garlic) and salt (about 1/2 tsp) until it tasted like I wanted it to.