My dear friend, PK, has given Besotted much love, support, and advice from the very beginning, and I am finally taking his advice from way back when to include a salsa recipe….

 

As much as I love baking, its precision and the inability to taste-test the recipe as I go stifles my…. creative flair. I love recipes that have a very basic base to which I can add anything that happens to cross my mind. That, coupled with the fact that Boston will be hitting 90° today (!) made it imperative that I start my Summer Salsa Experiments a bit early.

 

Salsa is a great dish for experimentation and for the novice cook, as it is very nearly impossible to mess up. I was about to write that as long as you have a base of tomatoes and onions, adding the rest of the ingredients is just a matter of personal preference, but, in fact, this recipe contains no tomatoes, so even that element is subject to change.

 

My only suggested guidelines would be to find juicy fruits and vegetables whose flavors meld well together, add a few complementary spice/spicy elements, blitz together until you reach the desired consistency and serve.

 

Speaking of which, the serving and presentation of salsa can be a varied as the ingredients. It is generally thought of as an accompaniment to tortilla chips, and it does serve admirably in this capacity, but salsas can also serve a more sophisticated function, accompanying pork or chicken recipes as a stuffing or sauce, as a topping on toasted baguettes, etc. They are, in essence, wildly versatile.

 

The following is my adaptation of a Barefoot Contessa recipe. A few tweaks to the ingredient list and preparation yielded this sweet, spicy, and very flavorful salsa. It’s perfect on tortilla chips, and, to be perfectly honest, I probably wouldn’t try it on anything more sophisticated; it has a very casual, almost raucous flavor that would be too much for something attempting sophistication. It would be like wearing cut-offs and drinking Sam Summer at the Symphony – both are fine in their own right, but don’t really go together.

 

Mango Kiwi Salsa

Adapted from Barefoot Contessa Mango Salsa

 

Ingredients:

 

2 Tbls. Olive Oil

1 Red Onion, quartered

3 Cloves Garlic

1 Tbls. Ginger, peeled

1 Mango, peeled and cut into slices

1 Kiwi, peeled and cut into slices

Juice from 1 Orange

1 Jalapeno Chili, seeded & chopped

½ Tsp. Salt

½ Tsp. Pepper

 

Preparation:

 

In the bowl of a food processor, pulse the ginger and garlic a couple of times, until it looks ‘rough chopped.’ Add the onion and pulse until the onion is well chopped.

 

Heat the olive oil in a saute pan over medium heat. Add the chopped onion, ginger, and garlic. Cook for 10 minutes. Quite a bit of the liquid from the onion should be cooking off.

 

 

Meanwhile, in the same bowl of the food processor, blitz the mango and kiwi until chopped, but still chunky (about 6 pulses).

 

 

After the onion mixture has cooked for 10 minutes, add the juice from the orange and allow to cook for another 5 minutes.

 

Once the 5 minutes is up, turn the heat down to medium-low, add the chopped jalapeno, salt & pepper, and cook for another 3-5 minutes.

 

 

Remove the saute pan from the heat and allow to cool for 15 minutes before adding to the mango/kiwi mixture. Mix well and serve with tortilla chips.