when life gives you tomatoes

make salsa!

Well, it wasn't life actually, it was my friend's dad.

We've had our first frost already, and for people who do the extreme DIY of food creation and grow their own, that meant emergency harvest of some veggies, and tucking the rest in under a blanket at night.

With no garden, not even a balcony for containers, I am always happy to accept donations of fresh home grown veggies. However, that was a lot of tomatoes, and they were getting pretty ripe, so I decided to use them all up at once. And since I've been craving heat like crazy lately...

Roasted Tomato Salsa

What you need:

• A lovely assortment of fresh ripe tomatoes ... I guess 2 pounds? Maybe 3?
• 5 giant jalapenos
• 1 onion
• 1 whole head of garlic (yes, a whole head)
• 1 lime (2 in the pic, I only used one)
• 1 bunch of cilantro
• oil
• salt

What you gotta do:

I opted to trim the stem parts off the tomatoes. You don't have to if you don't want to.

Preheat your oven to broil and move one of your oven racks up a level or two.

Chop the larger tomatoes in chunks (I did the big ones in quarters and the medium ones in half). Cut the onion into eighths. Cut the stems off the jalapenos, and cut them in half. If you really want to, take out the seeds and whatnot. Peel all the garlics.

Put the garlic, jalapeno, onion and tomatoes into a 9x13 roasting dish.

Drizzle on about 1 tbsp of oil, and toss the veggies in the oil until they're all nicely coated. Use your hands. It's okay. It's only food.

Put the veggies under the broiler.

If you have a decent oven, they should only take 15-20 minutes to be nice and roasty. After that much time, my tiny and apparently weak broiler had started to brown some of the skins, but the onions and jalapenos were still crispy.

I gave everything a stir and popped it back in the oven. It took another 20-25 minutes before everything was getting that nice browned roasty colour and smell.

Time to chop it.

Put the garlic, onion, and jalapenos (I just fished them out with a spoon) into your food processor.

Buzz this up for a few seconds. You don't want it too chopped, but if you don't do this step, by the time the onions and jalapenos are chopped, your tomatoes will be soup.

Drop the tomatoes on top of the pre-chopped stuff.

A few seconds is all it takes.

Now, we need something sour. Roasting the veggies, especially ones with super high sugar contents like onions and tomatoes, caramelizes the sugars and makes everything super sweet. That's where the lime juice comes in. You can use lemon juice or even white vinegar in this step.

This is where you chop and add the cilantro.

You're also going to want a bit of salt. I used about a teaspoon. The amount of salt you add is really dependent on how you plan on eating the salsa. I was planning on scooping it up with chips, so I used a chip as my taster.

If I'd salted the salsa by tasting it on its own, I would have ended up with a much saltier salsa. The salt on the chip makes a big difference.

I got quite a bit of salsa from that little portion of the emergency harvest.

The small containers went into the freezer since I'm not a canner. And a nice big bowl of it went onto my desk with some chips. And now there is cilantro on my statistics homework.

How did your garden grow?

tillo-berry pie

They really are fruits.

If you've ever seen a cape gooseberry, you'll know where I'm going with this. They're also sometimes called 'husk cherries'. I was served one once as a garnish on a fancy dessert, and had no clue what it was, so I didn't eat it. I really should have.

Because then I'd be able to tell you how they taste compared to a tomatillo.

Yup, a tomatillo. Very closely related to the cape gooseberry, in look and in taste.

Like tomatoes, tomatillos seem to have been relegated to the realm of savoury foods. They don't have to be though. They really are kinda sweet. They've got a bit of a citrus flavour to them too. And they pair nicely with cinnamon when you put them in a pie. It comes out as kinda 'mock apple' which is good I think, because it kinda eases people into the idea that you can actually eat this thing in a sweet dish.

The trend lately with foods seems to be the addition of sweet things to savoury ones, so Recipe Guy and I (being contrary, as usual) decided that we'd take something typically savoury and make it sweet.

Tillo-Berry Pie

• about 1 pound of small tomatillos
• 3/4 c sugar
• 3 tbsp tapioca
• 1 tsp lemon zest
• 1/2 tsp cinnamon
• 1/4 tsp nutmeg
• double pice crust 

If you want to make your own crust, you'll need

• 2/3 c cold butter
• 2 1/2 c flour
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 6-8 tbsp cold water

I like making my own crust, and it's really quite easy. Unlike making cakes and muffins, you want all of your pie crust ingredients nice and chilly.

Cut the cold butter into chunks about a tbsp in size, and dump in the flour and salt.

Use a pastry cutter to cut it all together until the biggest chunks of butter are about the size of peas.

Sprinkle on about 5 tbsp of ice water, and use a fork to cut the water into the flour. You don't want to "mix" this.

Mixing causes gluten to form and stretch, which is great for cakes and bread, but really the opposide of what you want for a flaky tender pastry.

Dump the very crumbly mixture out onto your rolling surface and add another tbsp or two of water.

The way I deal with pastry now is patting and folding. Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake baker's me! Resist the urge to do anything remotely related to kneading.

At first, the folding will be a bit weird, and not much like folding. You'll just be picking up part of the dough and putting it on top of another part, and then pressing them together. If it doesn't hold well after a couple times of doing this, sprinkle on a bit of water, and then fold a few more times.

Eventually, you'll end up with a lump that mostly sticks together after you pat it.

Cut this lump in half, set the slightly smaller half aside, and flour the other one, your surface, and your rolling pin. Check as you roll to make sure that it's not sticking.

If it is, use a knife to gently separate it from your surface, and flour both the surface and the pastry.

Roll it until it's a good couple inches in diameter bigger than your pie plate.

Use your rolling pin to help you carry it to the pie plate.

The filling is pretty simple.

Peel the pretty little paper lanterns off your tomatillos, and rinse them off.

Recipe Guy seems to have one plant that makes slightly purple tomatillos. Apparently there are varieties that are entirley purple.

Slice the tillos. Put them in a bowl.

Dump the other stuff on top.

Stir. Dump the filling into the crust.

Easy as...

The other half of your pie crust needs to be rolled out now. You can make a circle and put it on top whole (cut slits in it for steam to escape), or you can do a lattice top. A lot easier than you think and makes people say "ooo".

Roll out your other half into a rectangle, and slice it into 7 strips.

Lay 3 strips on the pie, and then fold the middle one back, and lay one of the remaining 4 across the two strips.

Switch! One comes forward, two go back.

Repeat until you run out of strips.

Press the edges of the strips to the edge of the bottom crust, and use the scraps left after cutting your strips to fill in the blank spots.

I recommend brushing the crust with a beaten egg now, rather than after it's been in the oven for 20 minutes. The egg makes is lovely and shiney, and helps its brown a bit too.

Bake at 425 for 20 minutes, then turn down the heat to 350, and bake for another 30 minutes.

The early high heat helps the crust brown and crisp before the fruit starts oozing juices all over it and making it soggy. The later lower heat makes those juices bubble into tasty sweet filling.

It worked! It really worked!

I think I'd like to put a few more tomatillos in next time, and maybe less cinnamon to make it less like a mock apple and more like a tillo pie, but it really did work!

What "savoury" ingredient do you think would work well in a sweet?