Showing posts with label cilantro. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cilantro. Show all posts

Friday, June 16, 2017

Fresh Peach and Corn Salsa

A fresh salsa perfect for summer snacking! Fresh corn and peaches tossed with spicy cilantro-lime mix uses the best of summer produce. Got your chips ready?


a bowl of fresh peach and fresh corn salsa surrounded by chips for dipping

Follow me | Pinterest | Instagram | Facebook




One of the best things about eating with the seasons is the utter satisfaction of meals made with ingredients picked at their perfect ripeness. Think of strawberries in November, corn on the cob in January, tomatoes in March . . . they do not satiate you in as satisfying a way as their counterparts eaten 6 months later when locally available. [I'm speaking to my fellow Midwesterners and middle-of-the-East Coasters here, folks used to temperate climes. For those readers in tropical climates your ripening schedule mileage will indeed vary.]



A fresh salsa perfect for summer snacking! Fresh corn and peaches tossed with spicy cilantro-lime  mix uses the best of summer produce. Got your chips ready?



We eat a lot of salsa around here. It's an after school snack for the kids, an "I just walked in the door from work and I'm STARVING" snack for my spouse, a bit of local food with many meals, and one of my most successful canning projects. Even though I put up plenty of tomato-based salsas, Salsa Verde with Roasted Hatch Chiles, Peach Salsa with Golden Plums, and Roasted Corn and Hatch Chile Salsa, I'm still lured by the availability of fresh seasonal produce.




When you've got a pile of ripe produce--gorge away, and then have at this salsa. The longest step, cooking the corn, can be done ahead of time. My eyes are always bigger than our bellies when I'm buying fresh ears of corn at the farmer's market, and corn is best when cooked soon after picking, so I always cook the whole batch at once and then use the cooked corn later. This peach and corn salsa is quick to make and easy to enjoy. May I suggest a Cheater Margarita Smoothie as the perfect summer sipper?

Monday, July 18, 2016

Salsa Verde with Roasted Hatch Chiles (Canning recipe)

This tangy green salsa gets bright flavors from tomatillos and roasted Hatch chiles for a smooth dipping sauce that is also excellent in baked dishes. This canning recipe provides ample stores to enjoy the flavor year round.


an assortment of jars of canned goods


Follow me | Pinterest | Instagram | Facebook


close up of a home-canned jar of salsa verde with roasted hatch chiles


This salsa is one of the easiest canning projects I've done--very little chopping, doesn't matter if you've chopped uniformly or not, only a few ingredients to measure. The immersion blender (and the chile roaster at my local grocery store) do the bulk of the work. The hardest part for me last year was sourcing the tomatillos.


tomatillos being chopped for salsa verde with roasted hatch chiles



In previous years I'd get ample amounts of tomatillos in my Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm share. In fact, that's how I started making salsa verde. My first time making salsa verde was NOT born from a desire to eat salsa verde, but from a lack of anything else to do with the tomatillos that were sitting on the counter!



tomatillo plants in the garden, showing the balloons that will become tomatillo fruits


After the initial batch, we got hooked on this tangy concoction. Last year I had difficulty sourcing enough local tomatillos to make a batch. I even spent 2 Saturdays hitting up various farmer's markets in order to get enough. This year I'm growing my own tomatillos. So far, so good. Wish me luck!


a square image of jars of salsa verde and tomatoes from the canner


No Hatch chiles? No problem! Simply use the hot pepper that's available to you. It doesn't even matter if you roast it or not--the flavor will be different if using roasted peppers, but the recipe works either way. I can't give you any roasting tips because I buy my chiles already roasted. I picked up a container of roasted Hatch chiles once on a whim and I loved the flavor so much I come back year after year for more. Roasted chiles freeze well, so what doesn't get put up in salsas in the summertime gets used throughout the year. This year I'm going to try my hand at making chile rellenos with a quart, since we discovered that amazing concoction while Eating Locally on the Road last summer.


You could cool and eat this salsa right away, but I'm also giving canning instructions because this is my spouse's favorite salsa (mine is my Peach, Yellow Plum and Hatch Chile salsa recipe) and we eat salsa all year long. It's a terrific after school or pre-dinner snack, especially if you have family members who need to eat RIGHT NOW while you're standing in the kitchen finishing dinner preparations. Not that it's ever happened to me.

Monday, April 29, 2013

Fish Taco Enchiladas

My dining room table is a battlefield.

I don't mean the battle over homework, though that also occurs at the dining room table, the breakfast nook table, and the Lego table.  I also don't mean the battle for Europe, or orange train cars, or vending cart cards, or goats for women.
Though as an aside, if you want to add more board games to your Game Nights I highly recommend the Board Game Family's recommendations. My spouse, with that site's advice, kickstarted our twice weekly FGNs after years of trying and failing to get a FGN routine going. And these games we play?  Great for adults without kids, too--they are just plain fun, unless you're malicious like my daughter playing Spot It--she always wins.
No, in fact I mean the How To Fold A Burrito Properly battle.  There are 4 of us eating, and we each fold our burritos in a different way.  And of course each one of us thinks we're right.  (My spouse is.) You'll notice in my Mu Shu (ish) Chicken Burrito post that I completely sidestepped the folding debate.  I'm sidestepping it again here, this time by making enchiladas! (I'm sure this says something about my personality or birth order or whatnot, but perhaps it's just that in the grand scheme of things it doesn't matter to me how you fold your burrito.  Your sushi rolling is a different story.) I'm sharing this now because it is a tasty recipe and helped me to add variety in the proteins that we eat.

http://www.farmfreshfeasts.com/2013/04/fish-taco-enchiladas.html

It just makes sense that eating a variety of foods in our diet is best, you know?  My family is fortunate that eating seasonally from our CSA farm share means that the produce in our diet (and that of the composting guinea pigs) is naturally varied.
I mean, I'm not going to the grocery store on Saturday and buying a head of lettuce, a package of tomatoes, a bag of carrots, and a bunch of bananas each and every week all year 'round.  Instead I'm yearning for tomatoes amidst the greens in May and overrun with squash and eggplant in August.  Such is the life of a CSA subscriber!  And that's the way I like it--eating from my CSA farm share appeals to me in ways I never considered when we started 8 years ago. I thought it would be similar when we got part of a cow for our freezer.  And it was, in part--we tried beef tongue tacos and ox tail stew for the first time.
What I didn't realize was that we'd end up eating more beef than we usually do, just because we have it in the house.  I have to work at eating protein sources other than beef--which is why I was tickled to see frozen Swai (aka Pangasius or Basa) fillets for $1.99/pound at the store.  Swai is a white fleshed fish in the "Good Alternative" category on the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch website.  Protein that is a Good Alternative, that is a great price, is good for me.

But what to do with the Swai fillets?

I had some leftover shredded cabbage/coleslaw mix, cilantro, Greek yogurt, some of my home-canned salsa verde made with farm share tomatillos and roasted Hatch chiles from the grocery store down the street, and enchilada-size tortillas, so you can easily see why I went in the direction I did here.  While it is technically an enchilada, it's not covered with a ton of cheese and a rich sauce.  The cabbage still had a bit of crunch to it, the fish was firm, the whole dish just worked.  If you have Swai or any firm white-fleshed fish (tilapia, cod, perch and whitefish are all on the approved list of the website) try this twist on the traditional fish taco, avoid the burrito-folding battles, and add variety to your plate.