Chips and Salsa

Tonight we had the best salsa yet.  Ever since we looked for and found the recipe for the Tortilla Factory salsa (legendary in this area), Jon has been experimenting with it.  He makes a giant tub every time -- enough to fill one of those 3 lb. Breakstone cottage cheese containers.  The secret that we could never figure out, when it was a proprietary recipe, is that it is much more like salad dressing than salsa -- it has oil and vinegar at its base and then you add high quality cooked tomatoes and Greek oregano and some other stuff.  And THEN you have to let it sit in the refrigerator for several days. It does not taste good right when you first make it.  Before Rebecca comes to visit, Jon sometimes makes a series of batches, one for each day, knowing that she will be able to polish off a whole one almost by herself as soon as she walks in the door.

A few days ago Jon discovered that he had no commercially sourced crushed tomatoes (there is a specific Italian brand of plum tomatoes that the Tortilla Factory used, but I don't know the name anymore) and he was all ready to make the salsa.  He wasn't sure how it would come out but he decided to use our own stewed tomatoes.  He worried that they would just be too watery.  So he poured out all the liquid, changed the recipe by increasing the proportion of tomatoes by a cup, and whizzed it all up in the food processor.

The best.  I usually don't sit and eat chips and salsa until the bowl is empty (the bag of chips is huge so finishing that is not an option).  This time I just kept eating and eating. I think the homegrown tomatoes, subtle though they may be in this context, made this the best salsa ever.

As I ate, I started to think about how we generally cook and eat in this house.  When Jon had a real job and I was mostly in charge of the cooking and shopping, our menus were different from nowadays.  First of all, we had young kids and that generally meant more pasta, more homemade pizza, more mashed potatoes.  About ten years ago, Jon stopped driving away to go to work every day and he gradually took over the shopping and eventually most of the cooking.  This has been a definite upgrade in all regards. I still make most of the soup (a staple of ours -- one winter I wrote down all the types of soup as I cooked them and there were about 75 homemade iterations) but Jon is much more adventuresome. 

When Jon finds some food that interests him, he learns to make it. He has perfected the Middle Eastern menu that we all like.  He always makes excellent brisket at the holidays.  He makes chili and stew and Mexican (too easy) and Chinese stir fries and, very infrequently, sweet and sour chicken.  My favorite soup that he makes is Tom Ka Gai, a Thai chicken soup. I could eat that for days on end.  Unfortunately for him, I don't like things as spicy as he does, so he has to add more hot sauce to his own food later.

As the years have gone by, we have stopped buying anything but basic ingredients.  Well, he still buys Thai green chili paste in those little teeny jars.  He shops at the Asian supermarket for winter vegetables and seasonings, Costco for dairy and olive oil and giant boxes of oatmeal and big bags of walnuts, Trader Joe's for trifles.  But it seems to me that the shopping trips are much less frequent, now that there are only two of us, and we tend to eat our inventory down to almost nothing before the next shopping trip. I am much better than he is at cooking whatever is there -- tonight I made a big pot of chicken soup with one of Lani's chickens and used up all the dribs and drabs of vegetables and a bunch of spinach.  But I was really too full for soup after all those chips and salsa.

We are very lucky to live right in the center of a vortex of excellent fresh ingredients.  The other day we may have eaten some of the best spinach that anyone has ever tasted, two hours after it was picked. We get a weekly delivery of raw milk. Sometimes I make yogurt when the milk starts to pile up.  Lani's eggs are always available.  In the fall we butcher a few deer that Roger drops off in the cooler, already peeled (that is an arduous process, taking a deer apart, but it is our main meat source).  We can a lot of tomatoes when they are at their most delicious in late summer.  We freeze scandalous quantities of blueberries and garlic curl pesto and random surplus vegetables. We even salvage and chop up the good parts of rotting onions and freeze them because it is so hard to grow onions that we don't want to waste a single one.

Our kids eat well too in their faraway kitchens, even though they live with so many disadvantages, compared to us. When Jon goes to Boston, he packs a cooler full of frozen venison, chili, fruit for the girls.  And when they come home, they plunder the blueberry stash and request chicken soup.  To be fair, they also bake luscious treats and freeze them for us -- neither of their parents is a dessert maker.

Who could have guessed that Jon would turn out to be The Cook?  When I met him he could make exactly five dishes.  Jon's curiosity and talent and America's Test Kitchen have changed our lives forever.  We almost never make homemade pizza, as good as it is.  There are too many other possibilities now.  Jon keeps saying he wants to learn to make Indian food.  It'll happen. Next time we have too much milk we can make saag paneer -- Benjamin knows how, so we know who to ask if we need advice.  I already know how to make Greek yogurt, and this sounds easier than that.

All this rambling, just because we had the best salsa ever tonight. Maybe this summer we will work on canning tomatoes that are meant for salsa and give out the recipe so everyone can make it.