I spent almost three years of my life living in Tegucigalpa, Honduras.  While living there my absolute favorite food was pupusas.  They’re not hard to love, considering they are pretty much like the corn tortilla version of pizza (which I am rather obsessed with).

It’s a simple idea, you take a ball of masa dough, make a hole in the center and stick in a lump of cheese, or meat, or veggies, or a mixture of those, pat it flat, fry it up with a decent amount of grease, and serve it with a variety of spicy cabbage slaws and krauts.

I didn’t appreciate it at the time, but the main type of kraut used on top of pupusas is called curtido, which is pretty much just a broad term for pickle.

I have played around with various non-fermented versions of curtido over the years but it wasn’t until I won a copy of Fermented Vegetables by Kirsten and Christopher Shockey (available also in Canada) that it finally hit me what was missing from my version—mine wasn’t fermented!

The recipe is very simple, just cabbage, carrots, onion, garlic, and chile pepper flakes, and oregano and cumin.  You can take the curtido in different directions by tweaking the ratios, making it hotter or milder, more herbs or less, more of one vegetable or less, and so on.  I was running out of carrots the day I made mine so I think I’ll use more next time, partly because it will add more color to the final product.

The recipe is adapted from Fermented Vegetables, and if your library doesn’t have this book I highly recommend getting yourself a copy (or asking them to get it!).  I’m so happy to have won a copy because I love the book and have read through pretty much the whole thing!  Now I see before me a summer full of fermenting….

It will be a week or two before it’s fully fermented, but making it now will help connect you to the spirit of Cinco de Mayo, which is ¡perfecto!  Once it is ready make your favorite tacos, burritos, or even try making pupusas, and then be sure to put tons of curtido on top.

(This post has been updated a few times since 2014, including the past two summers with info about prices found at St. Jacob’s Market in Ontario).

Our final batch of salsa that we canned for the year, Chunky Peach Salsa, was definitely our best.  And maybe that is because after canning 3 other batches we learned a couple things.

One thing we learned was not to cook the peaches very long or they got lost amongst the tomatoes.  Basically we now just add the peaches to the salsa right before we’re ready to start canning.

Second was that if you don’t want to add tomato paste to thicken the salsa then you’ll have to cook it for a long time.  This could mean simmering the salsa for 1-2 hours….

So our final canning session for salsa leaves us with a total of 56 pints of 4 different kinds of salsa (including the homegrown salsa I wrote about earlier this week).  And while 56 pints may seem like a lot it’s essentially 1 pint a week for the next year with 4 extra for sharing or larger eating events.  Yes, we eat a lot of salsa.  Well, my family eats a good amount of it, but without me around they’d likely only need about 20 pints for the year.

Here is the recipe and it is loosely based on our friend’s (non-peach) salsa which we refer to around here as “Mr. Dan’s.”  When we made this the other day we did a double batch which produced 18 pints.  A single batch will likely produce 9-11 pints, but results will vary based on the variety of tomatoes used and how long they are cooked down.

Update, 2017

Here’s what I got at St. Jacob’s Market here north of Waterloo in late August, to make a quadruple batch:

• 1/2 bushel Roma tomatoes($11)
• 1/2 bushel San Marzano Tomatoes ($12 or $15 depending on vendor)
• 1/2 bushel sweet banana peppers ($12)
• 1/2 bushel Red Haven peaches ($15 for the smaller uglier ones)

And 2018:

• 1 bushel Roma tomatoes for $15
• 1/2 bushel long red sweet peppers $15
• 1/2 bushel Red Haven peaches $20

And what I generally have from our garden, CSA or elsewhere:

• 1 large bunch cilantro
• 5 lbs onions
• 3-4 heads garlic
• 1 litre/quart cider vinegar (we actually make our own… which it seems surprising I don’t have a post about!)

For one thing we have a huge bag of tomatoes on the floor, another full of peppers, and peaches are covering our hutch.  Luckily eventually I find the right attitude and energy and I get back to feeling good about all this cooking and preserving.   Plus everyone here works really hard:

Yesterday my young assistant and I tackled the homegrown tomatoes by turning them into an entirely homegrown salsa.  Well, it was entirely homegrown until we realized that it was way too runny because we had thrown several Brandywine tomatoes into the mix.  Thus there was an addition to the recipe of a small can of tomato paste.

Ahhh well, we can’t always be purists and that’s probably okay.  Luckily there is no rule book when it comes to eating local, just a desire to eat as close to home whenever possible.

Although this salsa is for canning we’ve also been enjoying lots of fresh salsas with whatever ingredients we have on hand.  The most obvious thing of course is the peaches, but we’ve found that most fruits work well in salsa as do many unconventional vegetables.

Cucumbers, as pictured above, are an amazing addition to a fresh salsa.  They bring a light fresh flavor of their own but also soak up all the flavors of the foods around them while adding a nice crunch and color to the final product.

Radishes are great too, for the combination of spicy flavor, color, and crunch.  Recently we added kohlrabi to a salsa, which was great too!  It turns out that as long as you meet a few requirements pretty much any fruit or vegetable can go in a salsa.  Here are our guidelines for creating unique original salsas:

1. Some crunchy things, like any of the following, nicely diced in small pieces: onions (any colour), sweet peppers, radishes, cucumbers, apples…
2. Some sweet things, also nicely diced: peaches, plums, nectarines, apricots, apples, pears, watermelon, cantaloupe, honeydew, strawberries, tomatoes, sweet corn…
3. Some fillers, (diced if necessary): black beans, cucumbers, extra tomatoes, fruit…
4. For some spice and zing: hot peppers (diced, or dry crushed red peppers if you don’t have anything fresh), cilantro, lime juice (or local options would be cider vinegar or verjus if you can find it), garlic, a dash of cumin, and salt and pepper.

I recently shared 5 salsa recipes on the Bailey’s Local Foods blog so check those out for more inspiration.  Today’s recipe is for an (almost) all homegrown salsa for canning.  You’ll need a pressure canner for this recipe because there is not enough added acid (vinegar or lemon/lime juice) to make it fully safe for water bath canning.  If you added a whole cup of vinegar it would likely be safe for water bath canning, but we didn’t want that much vinegar flavor in this recipe.

This recipe yields 7-9 pints, depending on how much you cook it down.

On Wednesday I had leftover pizza dough in the fridge from my Young Assistant’s birthday party a few days before.  It was just the boys and I for dinner because Madame was in Toronto for work.  I pulled the dough out and assessed what ingredients were available for toppings.  Leftover whipped butternut squash in the fridge from the night before.  Onions.  Walnuts.  Greens growing in the garden.  An emergency stash of mozzarella in the freezer and a small amount of goat cheese.  I did a quick search for foods that can accompany butternut and decided some caramelized onions and wilted greens would do nicely.  Oh and I did a second pizza that was much simpler that the boys preferred, it just had sauce and cheese….  So here’s the butternut pizza that emerged:

Butternut and Caramelized Onion Pizza Topped with Wilted Greens

Ingredients:

• whipped butternut* (½  cup or more)
• ½ cup onion (or more), chopped and fried with a bit of olive oil until nicely caramelized (5-10 minutes)
• ½ cup walnuts
• 5-10 leaves of chard/spinach/other green, chopped coarsely
• mozzarella (grated or sliced thinly)
• soft goat cheese (crumbled)
• olive oil
• balsamic vinegar
• pizza dough (I recommend this one)

Stretch your pizza dough and top with the whipped butternut.  Add the cheeses, caramelized onions, and walnuts.  Cook at 500 for 4-5 minutes.  Meanwhile chop the greens and toss them in a small amount olive oil and balsamic vinegar.  Open the oven and quickly add the greens on top of the pizza and cook 2-3 more minutes, until they are wilted.  Enjoy!