Salsa Time Again

Well, you may recall, I got into making salsa last year after tasting some of the salsa that my boss' wife made. Unfortunately, I only have one jar of salsa left from last season. In hopes of growing my own ingredients to make more salsa this year, I planted a mini garden. I had high hopes of getting a permanent garden installed, but never did get around to it. Thus, I planted 6 tomato plants and 6 pepper plants in containers and sat them in my back yard. Well, the tomatoes took off, but now they all have blossom end rot. And the peppers got off to a slow start when blackbirds snapped off all of the blossoms. So, I stopped at a local produce stand and picked up 10 large tomotoes and grabbed some green peppers from the grocery store. For hot peppers, I used some of the dried Habanero and Chili peppers from last season. So, I canned 4 pints of salsa today, at least it's a start. I should have my own peppers to use in another 10 days or so. I've got Anaheim and Jalapeno peppers coming on strong, so they should make a decent batch of salsa. I'll just have to buy more tomatoes from the local sources. I'm pretty much giving up on my tomatoes for the year, and hope to get a permanent garden built this fall. I've also got a bush full of Habanero peppers that should ripen in another 20 days or so. They are so hot, they are almost uneatable, but I still intend to dry them, and perhaps use a couple to make a kick ass batch of salsa that no one will want to eat.

Not What Our Forefathers Had In Mind

Well, I trust everyone had a great 4-day July 4th holiday weekend. However, upon experiencing some of the festivities, I'm not sure this is entirely what our forefather's had in mind. It seems that the holiday has become a drunken fest when we try to literally blow things up. Wow, it sure seems like there were a LOT of fireworks this year. There was a party in our neighborhood on Friday before July 4th, and it was huge. They had an entire truckload of fireworks, and it was a non stop barrage from 5pm through midnight. Our dogs were going nuts. Then, there were the professional displays. Fortunately, where we built our house, we can see three professional displays, looking south, north, and west. That's kind of neat. I tried to take the dogs outside to let them do their business right at the time that the show to our west kicked off. The fireworks were launched less than a mile from our house, but were exploding directly overhead. The dogs lost it, and were nothing but a pile of bubbling goo the rest of the weekend. On Monday, we attended a party at my sister-in-law's in-laws. They also had a pickup full of fireworks, and were blowing things up non stop. In fact, one of their biggest experiments was a roll of 8000 firecrackers that were all ignited at once. We think it literally blew a hole in the street. Another "illegal" artillery shell almost knocked us out of our chairs. Tuesday was a continuation of the festivities. Again, the dogs were having a hard time. So, all in all, I hope everyone enjoyed the holiday, celebrating their independence. But thank God, it's over for another year.