Salsa Verde

I know that I will come nothing close to Sarah's expertise as a chef, but I have a recipe for salsa that I brought back with me from Mexico. SInce my husband is out of town and I am having to cook, I made it to go with the Cindy's beans and rice recipe.

When I moved to Mexico in 1992 to serve as an administrative consultant for a Bible College there, I lived with students. We were blessed, during my first semester, to have cooks that prepared food for us, but later because of a transition, cooked our own food. For breakfast we had beans, eggs and tortillas. For lunch we had beans, tortillas and some kind of meat or soup. For supper we had beans, eggs and tortillas. Occassionally we would have something a little different for the noon meal, but the rest was pretty much the same.

When I arrived, I saw this green salsa that didn't look all that good and the students ate it on everything. They ate it with the eggs, with the beans, with whatever they were having. They spread it on mashed potatoes, ate it with fries on the rare occassion we had them. It went on beef tacos, and was spread on roticerree chicken. It was just the standard for everything.

The first time I tasted it I wasn't sure what I thought . . . but after a few months, I was addicted. I realized just how hooked I was when I caught myself dipping a grilled ham and cheese sandwich in it.

When I moved to Minnesota in 1994, I instantly bought everything I needed to make the salsa so that it would not be removed from my diet. Life progressed, I made it for Bart when we were dating and he hated it, and so I made it less and less.

Here's how you do it -- I learned from a girl from a remote village (3 hour walk from the closest bus-stop) in the Huasteca -- an area located in the Sierra Madre mountains of the state of San Luis Potosi. She taught me on a gas stove in a small kitchen in Puebla and this is the first time, this very moment, that I will have ever written it down.

Here are the ingredients:

12 tomatillos
6 chile serranos
2 or three garlic cloves
1 onion
a Knorr Suize Chicken bullion cube (or, for those of you vegetarians, I'm sure a vegetable bullion cube would work fine too)
a handful of cilantro


Here's what you do:

1. Remove the outer husk from the tomatillos and wash them.
2. Pull the stems off of the serranos.

(I was taught to cook the onions, chiles, and tomatillos in oil, but since have modified this to broiling)

3. Broil the vegetables until the tops are brown.

Dump all the vegetables in a blender. Blend on high until they are completely blended. Add the garlic and bullion cube and then blend them again.

Put in more cilantro than you think you should and blend some more.

Taste it with a tortilla or tortilla chip. If it is too overwhelmingly spicy, add some water.

The key is to balance the number of tomatillos to the number of chilis so that it doesn't come out too spicy. This takes experiementation.

I've found that the 12 relatively large tomatillos and 6 relatively small serranos works well.

Anyway, if you like spicy salsa, this it totally the best ever. If you're a wimp (like my husband and half my kids) you may not like it, but it's still the bomb.


See why I'm not a food writer?