People are Always Asking Me

"Andy, I love those delicious fresh salsas that you get in restaurants, how can I make one at home?"
Oh, hang on a second, the phone's ringing.
Yep, that was yet another person wanting a fast and easy salsa recipe. Well,
here it is then, uncensored, the director's cut. This recipe features my classified until now secret salsa Kachow! technique you lucky little monkeys.

Andy's Poorly Named Salsa

You're going to need:

Fresh Roma Tomatoes (or tomatillos if you can find them, but good luck in SK) As many as you'll need. If you want to make a pound of salsa, buy a pound of tomatoes. You want a nice firm tomato, no blemishes, the darker red the better.

Red Onion-I use about a 20-1 ratio of tomatoes to onion, but I really don't like onions much.

Lime-basically an 8-1 ration of tomatoes to lime is good.

Chile Pepper-this is purely a matter of preference. You can use fresh or dried. I personally use a dried arbol chile, which registers at around 30,000 on the Scoville heat scale, or around 8 on a scale of 1-10. . But fresh jalapenos and/or serranos work just as well. (FYI most Jalapenos come in at about 4,000 Scoville units but can be hotter , serranos tend to be anywhere from 7000 to around 23000.)

Cilantro-you can go as high as a 4-1 ratio of salsa to cups of chopped cilantro leaves.

(Optional-Avocado, Black Bean, Corn although the avocado will decrease the shelf life by about half.)

Okay. You have everything you need. Dice the tomatoes to your own prefererred size. Personally, I like a nice .5cm cube. Next, dice the red onion. I like about half the size of the tomato dice here. Now, as promised, here's the Kachow ingredient.
It's all about the lime. A lot of people throw a little lime juice into their salsa, and so do I. But I take it a step further. I use lime zest as well as lime juice. The lime zest adds color, texture and a base note that will have people begging to know what your secret is. Kachow!
If you're using fresh chilies you'll want to dice them very fine, being careful to pull out the seeds and stems. A note of caution here. Peppers will burn the hell out of your eyes, and some people find that cutting them even burns their skin. You want to be sure to wash your hands after handling hot chilies. Believe you me. This is one of the reasons dicing onions comes ahead of dicing chilies in our steps. You really don't want to rub your eyes for several hours after handling chilies, trust me on this one.
Finally you want to add your optional ingredients here. I include cilantro in the optional ingredients because I personally hate that %^&$, but that's just me. There is nothing wrong with using canned ingredients, particularly when it comes to legumes such as the black beans. Just be sure to rinse your canned ingredients well.
You have some choices to make with the corn. There is straight up yellow kernel corn, which adds a nice bright color to your presentation, peaches and cream corn which again adds color but with varying shades. I like the look of peaches and cream corn and that's my choice. If you're going for authenticity you can use a white hominy or pozole style corn, usually found in import food stores. It's corn with the germ removed from it, and quite a different texture than what you're used to.
Doh, my daughter just called from school, she fell off the monkey bars and wants to come home, so I have to cut this short. Happy Salsa-ing.