Salsa Time!

No, not dancing, I'm afraid my dancing days are pretty much over.  I made salsa today and canned it.

This is my big Anya pot.  My dear friend Anya gave me this pot and it holds a humongous amount.  It's a really nice stainless steel pot with a heavy bottom and a lid too.  I actually had one batch in the pressure canner already when I remembered to take this photo, you can even see the steam rising.  

I use a lot of canned tomatoes, especially Rotel tomatoes and salsa.  It gets expensive even if I buy the store brand so I decided to buy the #10 cans of tomatoes and some jalapenos & onions and make my own.  I roughly chopped 2 large onions and opened the #10 cans.  The tomatoes were whole so they had to go in the food processor with the onions.  I had gotten 3 large and 2 regular size cans of tomatoes marked down because they were dented so those went in too as well as 2 jars of marked down chopped jalapenos drained and 2 fresh jalapenos seeded and chopped.  I did add some salt and some garlic powder.

This was all heated in the Anya pot.  As I filled the jars I added fresh chopped cilantro and half a spoonful of citric acid as you can never tell about tomatoes anymore having enough acid.  It took pretty much all Sunday afternoon but I now have 22 pints of salsa and 3 quarts of tomato veggie juice.  The juice was the nearly 2 quarts of juice from the #10 cans and 1 ice cube of beet juice, 2 ice cubes of greens juice and about a pint of carrot juice from the freezer.  I froze these when I had a juicing day a while back.  I added salt and garlic and onion powder to the juice.

Here's the salsa, the juice was still in the canner when I took this photo.  

Counting the cost of all the ingredients I spent about $16.  Rotel tomatoes come in small cans and it would take over 2 to fill a pint.  Just figuring on 2 per pint this would have cost about $44 for Rotel.  If you consider this is also salsa, this would have cost about $110 for the same amount of decent salsa.  I like my $16 much better.  And even if you figured in the extra $14 I spent on 2 dozen jars it's still cheaper.  And that's not counting the 3 quarts of juice which will be pretty much like V8, have you priced that lately?  I buy the store brand at Dollar General and its nearly $3 for a 2 liter bottle.

And yes, you can see my previous canning jars in the back ground, I still need to reinforce the shelves to store them.  With all this it will be a priority for next weekend.

Saturday I also canned 1 pint of leftover beef roast, 4 pints of leftover beef noodle soup and 3 pints of leftover sloppy joe beef.  Now I have some easy lunches or dinners.