Roasted Tomato Salsa

I can finally get to lots of household tasks that have been waiting for me around here. Sitting on a couple of trays in my spare bedroom, the rest of the tomatoes I picked green in early October had ripened. Plus, I needed to do something with the last of the fresh peppers in the refrigerator. I'd already put up 16 pints of tomato sauce earlier, so decided a batch of salsa sounded good.

My salsa canning recipe is ok, but could be better. Throwback at Trapper Creek had written about roasting her tomatoes for salsa on a post at the Simple Green Frugal Co-op blog a while back, and that sounded good. So I used her recipe, adapting it to what I had on hand.

I grow paste tomatoes for canning, so I just cored them and piled them into a roasting pan to roast more or less whole. After slipping the skins, I had 16 cups of tomatoes, so I increased all the ingredients by half again. I like a chunky salsa, so I just snipped the tomatoes into pieces with kitchen shears right there in the measuring bowl. I thought roasting the peppers would be good too, so I took the last of my fresh green bell peppers and a bunch of the fresh green jalapenos out to the barbecue grill. After they were roasted, sweated, peeled, and chopped, I added a few frozen chile "packets" until I had enough. I used my cayenne pepper hot sauce instead of Tabasco, and added a teaspoon of lime juice to each pint before filling the jars (to make it a bit more acidic, just in case roasting the peppers made more of them fit into the measuring cup). I put up 12 pints, with just a little bit left over for the refrigerator. So now, I'll have to see what Aries thinks.