Great Recipes Stemming from Bad Misunderstandings, Part 2

Look! A series. I’m just like Charles Darwin. I mean Dickens.

I recently wrote about accidentally inventing some delicious tacos due to a misunderstanding. In case you haven’t yet, you should make these tacos.

Hurry!

With the tacos I served homemade salsa — also, apparently, the result of a misunderstanding.

The rice recipe is not here, but it is coming.

Salsa Saga

My friend Manuel is the source most Mexican recipes in my life.*

I used to make this salsa all of the time, but it had been a while—years.

I recalled that you take an oven safe bowl, and add a can of tomatoes, a chopped fresh jalapeno (with the ribs and seeds in reserve), a loosely chopped onion, aa few cloves of garlic, and cumin, and cook on low heat for, um, a long time. Is there lime in it?  Called around a bit, and couldn’t find anyone to tell me. I couldn’t remember, and I didn’t add it.

The salsa ingredients can be cooked at about 300 hundred degrees for an hour. Because I now have a microwave, I tracked down my old blue Pyrex bowl, removed the Christmas lights sitting in it, and microwaved the ingredients . (Most of my bowls are not microwave safe; none of my Christmas lights are.) I tried to remember. When you use the microwave, is it 8 minutes? Or 12? Hmm. I did 12.

Then I removed part of the jalapeno so I could add more later if necessary, added some fresh cilantro, and used a hand blender to liquefy it.

Voooooom. We love the hand blender, Henry and me.

The resultant product was good. It needed more jalapeno. I added some. It needed a lot of salt. I added some. I was pretty happy with it, but when my husband came home and I asked him to taste it, he did, and then he said “so, what is it?” When I huffed around and told him salsa, he indicated that it needed a lot more salt. Duly noted. Salt salt salt.

When I talked to Manuel, I told him that I made his salsa, but that I didn’t use the canned tomatoes with basil in them, which was one of his tricks.

“I never did that. I often used stewed tomatoes, for the sweetness,” he said. Hmm.

Next, I told him that I couldn’t remember how much onion to use, so I used a bit more than half of a medium onion.

“Oh, I don’t even use the onion anymore. It makes it taste too much like onion.”

So I said “it’s just the garlic?”

“No, I started leaving the garlic our a long time ago.”

What is in his salsa is a mystery, but I’ll bet it’s better than my version. But this version is still really good.

Procedure

Preheat the oven to 300, or resign yourself to using a microwave.

Into an ovensafe bowl, put a can of whole peeled tomatoes, cumin, a sliced open jalapeno with seeds and ribs removed, a chopped onion, and 2 cloves of garlic.

Cook uncovered for 1 hour at 300, or cook in the microwave for 12 minutes.

Add cilantro. Blend ingredients together using a hand blender or a stand-up one. Season to taste with salt, more jalapeno, or cilantro.

Ingredients

• 1 large can whole peeled tomatoes (stewed if you wish)
• 1/2 t cumin
• a jalapeno
• a medium onion
• 2 cloves of garlic
• handful of cilantro
• salt

*aside from my guacamole trick, which is to grind garlic and salt around in the bowl before adding the avocado, and for some reason, this makes guacamole unreasonably delicious