Salsa

(blurry picture)

I never made salsa before in my life, although I've eaten lots of it. Well today a friend offered to show me how to can veggies, and salsa seemed like an appropriate choice as a first attempt. He brought the pressure cooker ans some other tools, and I had everything chopped up and put into neat little bowls just prior to his arrival, ready to be combined at a moment's notice.

So now I have ten jars of salsa (oops, I gave two away and now have eight) and have learned a valuable tool of preserving food in case our food supply and distribution is disrupted, as is commonly suggested. Having a temperate climate conducive to growing crops pretty much year round and sufficient access to fresh water may prove to be two of Cascadia's best assets going forward as food production becomes more regionalised.

But it's good to know that in a few hours I can realistically produce four cases of salsa, or pasta sauce, or beans, or any of the thousand other things I could probably can can. I wonder if I will pursue food preservation further? It was all around fun to spend this Saturday in the kitchen cooking and socializing. And fortunately all the produce came from Washington. Well except for the tomatoes from Mexico.