So Much Salsa!

Salsa is a beautiful thing. I will dump it on pretty much anything I’d also use ketchup, tomato, or marinara sauce with. How convenient, indeed, that Chris is a master of generating incredibly large volumes of salsa.

First, the ingredients:

So when I make pretty much anything involving peppers, I usually stick to green, as I am a cheap ho. I am baffled by whatever higher-up degreed that yellow, orange, and red peppers should cost more than green peppers. Are they that much more difficult to grow? They are certainly much more festive, but I hardly think festiveness earns anything a surcharge.

So Chris has this magical plastic device from his days of shilling kitchenware, whereupon you put a bunch of salsa ingredients into said device, twist a handle for awhile, and find yourself with delightful salsa or pico de gallo (depending on how soon your arms gets tired from cranking). Also included in this magical plastic set is a little dealio (and yes, that is the technical term) that you can shove into a lemon or lime to easily juice it. And, here’s a shot of that dealio in action!

Post-grinding, the salsa looked like this (and I’d seriously love a bathtub full of this stuff on a hot day….to, uh, dip all of my chips in…yeah…):

Ended up with about three lbs of salsa total. And trust me, this is not a bad thing at all. The lemon and lime totally agree!

So, since one cannot live on salsa alone, I ended up making a great deal of chicken quesadillas to eat with the salsa. So first, here’s my new favorite way to cut avocados (because avocado goes with pretty much anything that I’d eat salsa with):

The quesadilla itself was pretty basic – tortilla, then a few types of shredded cheese, a few chunks of pre-baked chicken, another tortilla on top, bake at 360 for 12 minutes.

It’s weird – I used to be a big proponent of shoving as many things as possible into a quesadilla. Then, at some point I realized this made the quesadilla highly prone to falling apart on it’s way to my mouth, as well as causing unnecessary sliminess. So these days, for the most part I stick to just putting meat and cheese inside my quesadilla. Most vegetables are better fresh anyhow when paired with a quesadilla, so I just pile everything I want on top. Which of course still leads to it falling apart on the way to my mouth. Oops!