A Garden Salsa Breakthrough

I've made fresh garden salsa (Pico de Gallo) for years - that's one of the main reasons I grow a vegetable garden. My basic recipe is hand-chopped ripe tomatoes, sweet peppers, onions, cilantro, some hot peppers for the "heat", seasoned salt, a dash of lime juice, a dash of red wine. Pretty standard stuff - and good!

The recipe varies according to availability of ingredients, and I put a lot of ripe, red sweet peppers in my last batch as well as some home-grown Mariachi peppers for the "heat". We're getting a lot of ripe peppers from the garden now.

I took a notion to do something different, and I chopped all the ripe red sweet peppers and the hot peppers up together. Then I put a little peanut oil in a skillet, got it real hot, and stir-fried half those chopped peppers until they were scorched and had just a little brown on them. Then I mixed the cooked peppers back into the uncooked peppers, and added all of them to the salsa.

My thinking was that I wanted the salsa to stay fresh and crunchy with raw onions and raw peppers, so I didn't cook all the peppers. I just wanted to add that great fried pepper flavor that goes so well in many dishes and even smells so good when peppers are cooking. Sort of a Chipotle salsa effect, I guess, but with the salsa still mostly raw, fresh, and crispy from the garden.

It worked! My garden salsa is always good, but this is by far the best ever - everybody who's tried it loves the flavor. I'll be stir-frying half my salsa peppers from now on!

Thought you'd like to know. :>)