Garden Recipe: Home-Grown Salsa
You can make a delicious salsa from a small balcony garden. Nothing tastes better than fresh ingredients picked right from the kitchen garden, prepared and eaten less than 5 minutes later! The best part is that you can make your salsa your own. Make it super spicy or super mild, add as much garlic or onion as you want, and you can prepare it and make it fresh throughout the gardening season. So why not devote a corner of your garden to a salsa garden?
Plants to Grow in the Salsa Garden
- Tomatoes (cherry tomatoes are fine and can grow in small containers)
- Garlic*
- Onion*
- Cilantro
- Peppers (serrano, jalapeno, habanero, etc.)
*Note: Garlic and onion grow better in cooler garden conditions and may not produce edible food during the hot summer months.
Ingredients List
(Makes about 2 cups)
- 2 cups of tomatoes (about 15 large cherry tomatoes)
- ½ clove of garlic, chopped
- 2 tablespoons of chopped onion
- 2 sprigs of cilantro
- 1 pepper, chopped and seeded, depending on how spicy you want the salsa
Wash a few tomatoes, finely chop some of your garlic and onion, and wash and get cilantro leaves from a sprig of cilantro. If you want a spicy salsa, chop your pepper and leave most of the leaves and vein (the inside white part) of the pepper. For a less spicy salsa, take out all of the seeds and cut out the vein. In either case, cut out the big white podlike part that most of the seeds are attached to. (Make sure to save some pepper seeds for next year’s planting!) Toss it all in a blender and blend as long as you want! You can make a puree or a chunky salsa.
Some people like to throw in a pinch of salt and a teaspoon or so of lemon juice to their homemade salsa from the garden. Salsa can also be mixed into scrambled eggs, baked with chicken or use it as a low-calorie salad dressing (with tortilla chip crumbs for croutons). Make a complete home-grown dish by cooking up some cubed potatoes with your salsa. There are many ways to eat salsa from your balcony's salsa garden.
