Roasted Tomato Salsa

Roasted Tomato Salsa New Mexico

By now, if you have been reading my blogs, you should understand that all salsa means is sauce. Generally, salsa is viewed as a tomato base chilé mixture that is served with chips as a dip or on Mexican foods.

Salsa is a wonderful and varied dish. Various fruits make delicious salsas too. There are corn salsas, bean salsas, pineapple salsas, peach salsas and many others. Only the limit of your palate and imagination will constrain your ability to experiment with salsas.

Pico de Gallo, a tomato type of salsa also, is very similar but the ingredients tend to be garden fresh rather than cooked.

New Mexico gardens are bursting with tomatoes this time of year. We don't get a frost until late October. The garden tomatoes may be covered at that time and I can get tomatoes until the end of November here. That means we have garden fresh tomatoes for Thanksgiving!

This year we planted 7 tomato plants and welcomed a volunteer tomato plant in our flower bed as well. The sweet little yellow tomatoes have gone positively wild on us. We can harvest a colander full of them nearly each day. The little red sweets are doing well too but they are planted next to the little yellow sweets and the little yellow sweets are over growing the red!

We also planted yellow girls and early girls (red.) Both of them are producing but again, the yellow tomatoes are out-producing the red. Our neighbors are especially fond of these. Vine ripened organic tomatoes taste better!

This is our second year planting the Russian Purple tomato. Last year the one we planted only produced one sad lonely little tomato. This year the plant was robust but it is just now throwing tomatoes. We hope to have our first Russian Purple tomato this month (September.)

My husband built-up two nice garden beds and filled them with a rich soil. The soil in our area needs to be amended in order to grow a garden. We also have two rain barrels that collect the water off of our roof. However, this year our monsoon rains were sparse and sporadic at best. We are in a severe drought here. So, we had to add water from our municipal system.

We xeriscape the rest of our yard. I have a link to an article, “Monsoon in New Mexico,” at the end of the article if you wish to see a bit more about our yard. Note that we are basic yard people not showcase yard people at all!

Let’s talk Roasted Tomato Salsa now!

Roasted Tomato Salsa is not as popular in New Mexico as I thought it would be. You actually are served this more often in Arizona. However, there are still some restaurants that serve the Roasted Tomato Salsa here and this salsa makes a fine accompaniment to most dishes.

Roasted Tomato Salsa

Pre-heat oven to 350°

Fill a baking pan with one layer of tomatoes, sweet peppers, large pieces of 2 chopped garlic cloves, and green chilés (or use pre-roasted green chilés, that is what I did here)

Toss these ingredients with 1-2 T. olive oil (I used a red pepper flavored olive oil this time) and 1-2 t. of kosher salt

Bake until the tomatoes are bursting

Remove from oven and let sit until you can work with the mixture.

Putting it together with a couple more ingredients:

Add ¼ cup of chopped green onions. You may roast these too if you wish.

Place all of the ingredients in a bowl and chop or mash up by hand.

Add ¼ C. of chopped fresh cilantro

Squeeze ½ to 1 whole lime on the mixture and gently stir

Taste to correct for more salt (the salt should be fine but taste test just in case)

IF you want to add a drop or two of Hickory Smoke essence (Nice to do once in awhile!)

Now, either serve chunky or hand blend to a slurry. Your choice on this!

If I was serving this with chips I would hand blend.

If I was serving this with enchiladas or meats I would leave chunky.

This was served chunky.

Here are some excellent ideas of where and how you may use this Roasted Tomato Salsa.

~ Eggs

~ On any meat from beef to pork to chicken and turkey

~Stuffing in pork chops and other meats

~Hamburgers

~ Cheese enchiladas

~ Chips (the obvious!)

~Cooked Corn, zucchini and other summer garden vegetable

For the love of tomatoes, do enjoy this!