SALSA JUSTICE

Have you heard of this stuff? It's called salsa and it's CRAZY good! It's refreshing but fiery hot at the same time. I'd never tried it before, but we at FOOD JUSTICE HOUSE thought we should make some...

FUN FACT: Salsa means SAUCE in Spanish.

In the FOOD JUSTICE GARDEN we grow peppers. Most of our crops died this summer, but the peppers survived the summer. This is a pepper:

Peppers are SPICY! We grow two types of peppers, jalapenos and habeneros. Jalapenos are spicy, but habeneros are SUPER SPICY.

FUN FACT: The habenero pepper is 10 to 30 times hotter than the jalapeno pepper.

Not that kind of Pepper!

We've been harvesting jalapenos for awhile, and we've just started to pick habeneros.  We thought it would be fun to make some of this super spicy salsa stuff.  We made our own recipe because we're smart and cool!  It's pretty spicy, be warned!  But it's super refreshing and has a delightful lime aftertaste.  Here it is:

SALSA FRESCA (this means FRESH SAUCE: this means no cooking, all the ingredients are just FRESH)

3 tomatoes, quartered

1/2 habenero

1/2 onion, cut in half

a handfull of cilantro

1 lime, juiced

1 clove garlic

salt to taste

Blend everything but salt in the food processor of your choice.  Be very careful when cutting the habenero...wash your hands after...don't touch anything after touching it...if you touch your eyes you could go blind or die...yikes!  Blend it to the consistency you prefer.  Salt to taste.  Serve chilled.  Yummmmmmm...

It should look like this:

Haha, jk, that would be strange!

It looks more like this:

Did not take this picture!

SALSA is cool and a great way to do justice to peppers.  MAKE BANKS PAY...for SALSA!

Experiments in Food Justice, Vol. 2: Sun-dried Tomatoes

Hello, friends of the movement!

Today's story begins with a really great thing turning horribly wrong.

Fay has a pretty nifty internship at WORKS (Women Organizing Resources, Knowledge & Services). Sometimes, they send her home with big bushels of vegetables, which is really great, because then we get to eat them without ever paying a cent.

One week, Fay came home with a gigantic flat of cherry tomatoes. And at first, it was good. We were very excited to have all these tomatoes, and we were thinking of all the amazing things we could do with them. But then we realized how many tomatoes we really had on our hands, and, well, we were a bit overwhelmed. There were, like, five pounds of tomatoes. Ten pounds of tomatoes. Maybe even fifteen pounds of tomatoes, but probably not.

We tried to use them in a lot of delicious dishes, such as salads, and a pretty fantastic fresh tomato sauce made by yours truly. But there were just too many. Due to lack of space in our little kitchen, we had the flat on top of the fridge, and every time we pulled it out, a swarm of fruit flies went zooming around. Tomatoes were going bad, turning to mush. Things were getting really ugly.

Then, a miracle. Noah "Got-Arrested-In-A-Bank-Protest-Maybe-You-Recognize-Him-From-The-Cover-Of-The-Oxy-Weekly-Or-CNN" Donnell-Kilmer came up with the clearly genius plan of SUN-DRYING the tomatoes.

While he never actually explained the mechanics of it to me, my impression is that the process was pretty simple. He halved the tomatoes, laying them out on baking trays, open side up. He threw some oregano and salt on those things, to make them extra tangy and tasty. The recipe apparently called for cheese-cloth to keep the bugs off, but Noah, the inventive madman that he is, made do with coffee filters. Then he set them outside in the sun, to dry. You know, sun-drying.



After a few days of diligently moving those trays to follow the sun over the course of the day, Noah had himself a batch of certified, grade A sun-dried tomatoes! We still haven't quite wrapped our minds around the possibilities of what we can make with them, but needless to say, we're excited.

OCTOBER UPDATE

Hi those who are interested in FOOD JUSTICE!

We've been working hard here at FOOD JUSTICE HOUSE.  We have done some things.  What have we done?

1. We've made these foods:

2. We saw a [Update: DOUBLE] rainbow:

3. We got arrested:

 

More updates soon...we're doing lots of cool stuff and it will be neat!