Salsa Verde with Roasted Hatch Chiles (Canning recipe)

This tangy green salsa gets bright flavors from tomatillos and roasted Hatch chiles for a smooth dipping sauce that is also excellent in baked dishes. This canning recipe provides ample stores to enjoy the flavor year round.

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This salsa is one of the easiest canning projects I've done--very little chopping, doesn't matter if you've chopped uniformly or not, only a few ingredients to measure. The immersion blender (and the chile roaster at my local grocery store) do the bulk of the work. The hardest part for me last year was sourcing the tomatillos.

In previous years I'd get ample amounts of tomatillos in my Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm share. In fact, that's how I started making salsa verde. My first time making salsa verde was NOT born from a desire to eat salsa verde, but from a lack of anything else to do with the tomatillos that were sitting on the counter!

After the initial batch, we got hooked on this tangy concoction. Last year I had difficulty sourcing enough local tomatillos to make a batch. I even spent 2 Saturdays hitting up various farmer's markets in order to get enough. This year I'm growing my own tomatillos. So far, so good. Wish me luck!

No Hatch chiles? No problem! Simply use the hot pepper that's available to you. It doesn't even matter if you roast it or not--the flavor will be different if using roasted peppers, but the recipe works either way. I can't give you any roasting tips because I buy my chiles already roasted. I picked up a container of roasted Hatch chiles once on a whim and I loved the flavor so much I come back year after year for more. Roasted chiles freeze well, so what doesn't get put up in salsas in the summertime gets used throughout the year. This year I'm going to try my hand at making chile rellenos with a quart, since we discovered that amazing concoction while Eating Locally on the Road last summer.


You could cool and eat this salsa right away, but I'm also giving canning instructions because this is my spouse's favorite salsa (mine is my Peach, Yellow Plum and Hatch Chile salsa recipe) and we eat salsa all year long. It's a terrific after school or pre-dinner snack, especially if you have family members who need to eat RIGHT NOW while you're standing in the kitchen finishing dinner preparations. Not that it's ever happened to me.

Grilled Korean-seasoned Chicken, Eggplant, and Pepper Rice Bowls

A summer dish made on the grill--Korean spiced chicken thighs grilled with farm share eggplant and peppers, topped with a fried egg and served in a rice bowl.

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I love an easy supper that can be--mostly--pulled off the grill and onto a bowl of rice. There's something very satisfying about eating from a bowl, and in the summer when it's hot it's rather nice to simply fire up the grill [and the rice cooker] and enjoy a complete meal.

When I came up with the idea for these bowls I already had chicken marinating in the fridge for my Korean-seasoned Grilled Chicken Thighs. I'd doubled the amount of chicken (on sale + on clearance) and skipped the marinated bag of veggies. But I had plenty of eggplant and bell peppers from the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm share, so I wanted to use them in a way the family would enjoy.


I was thinking of Bi Bim Bap, the Korean dish cooked/served in hot stoneware bowls with seasoned meats and veggies and an egg to finish. I decided to make do with what we had, and to make it on the grill. I opened against digging out the stoneware bowl I'd gotten for my spouse. Someday I'll  do him up a proper dish worthy of the bowl. I also opted against picking up some kimchi or making some Spicy Asian-inspired Pickled Kohlrabi because . . . summer heat sapped my oomph.

Peach Salsa with Golden Plums and Roasted Hatch Chiles (Canning recipe)

This thick blush-colored salsa is sweetly fruity from the peaches and plums, with a nice level of heat from the roasted chiles. It clings to the chip so you get all of the flavor while dipping.

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Most Saturdays in summer, I walk a dog or three down to the farmer's market to by fresh produce. Like a Summer Tomato Sandwich, fresh ripe peaches in summer are one of those tastes you just need to enjoy while you can because you cannot replicate the flavor with out of season produce other times of the year. So we gorge ourselves with fresh fruit, and I keep buying more because I know I've got to get it while the getting is good.


Last summer my friend Jen posted a photo of her canning efforts on FB, saying that her son polished off an entire jar of peach salsa in one sitting. Intrigued, I asked her for the recipe. She told me it's straight outta Food In Jars (Amazon affiliate link), Marisa McClellan's eponymous (ooh!) first book from her terrific blog.

I knew from the start that I was going to change up the recipe because I've become smitten with the flavor of roasted Hatch chiles. Each August my local grocery store fires up a chile roaster in the parking lot (a round cage like contraption with a flame shooting into it) and I can walk a dog (or three) down to pick up a quart of freshly roasted chiles. [Like my local farmer's market, the grocery store provides water for dogs.] These roasted chiles freeze well, and I buy several quarts for a year's worth of roasted chile needs. If you don't have a local source of roasted Hatch chiles, roast the hot peppers you've got, or pick up a can of roasted green chiles at the grocery store in the Hispanic foods aisle.

I was thinking about the color of the finished jars when I chose the orange-purple peppers at my Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm share pick up. The final piece for this recipe came when my favorite fruit vendor had yellow plums at the farmer's market. The plums were so ripe they weren't exactly the best looking fruit, and we had a conversation about how good looking produce has no correlation with good tasting produce. With the combination of ripe local peaches, plums, and orange-purple peppers, as well as roasted Hatch chiles, I was set to get my salsa on.