How We Made and Canned Salsa

Hello again! Today I’m sharing how we made and canned salsa.

You may remember how, about a month ago, I posted a tour of our family vegetable garden. It’s still coming along nicely. We’ve been able to harvest several varieties of vegetables already. We had to do something with those vegetables, however, so we decided to make salsa! I’ll share the process here. Let’s get started! (Oh, and here’s a link to the recipe we used.)

Unfortunately, our tomatoes haven’t been as fruitful as we’d hoped. We bought the tomatoes for the salsa at a local farm stand, instead.

On the other hand, the peppers are growing much better. Technically, No banana peppers were supposed to be used in the recipe. We didn’t have enough jalapeños, though, so we used what we had. That’s alright, right? 😉

The next step, we processed the ingredients. (I don’t have a photo of the onions, which were also chopped up in the food processor.)

We also added fresh cilantro, spices, sugar, and garlic (which we grew in our garden. 🙂 )

Next, we stirred all of the ingredients together, then put the pot on the stove, bringing the contents to a boil. While mom was taking care of that, I washed the lids and got the jars together to be ready for the next step…

…which involved sterilizing the jars and filling them with the freshly made salsa. As I filled them, mom came after and bubbled the jars, cleaned the edges, and put the lids and rings on.

Next, mom carefully placed the jars into the canner.

The Finished Product:

After that was finished, we had a little over sixteen pints of homemade salsa, ready to be taken out and eaten whenever we want. I must say, it was pretty satisfying to see them finished and sitting on the counter.

In my opinion, there’s an art to making things with your hands, be it a painting or a jar of salsa. It’s something you’ve put your time into, from the first time you pick up a pencil to begin drawing, to when you plant tomato and pepper plants.

Anyway, that’s how we made and canned salsa. I hope you’ll be inspired to try your hand at canning! It isn’t as hard as you may think. What do you say?

That’s all for now! What are you going to make with those freshly grown vegetables? ~ Emily