Salsa enlightenment

I cannot move on without thanking the salsa enlighteners: Laura, Joan, Florine, Mr. Fox and his bride from Falls Creek, and Angela (send me an email please, Angela; I have some stuff to tell you). These salsa enlighteners should meet each other because in their individual realms they have learned the universal "truths" about salsa.

Here are a few universal salsa principles:

• Cook the damn stuff
• Process it in a water bath
• The smaller the jar the better for that water bath; so pint jars are a whole lot more desirable than quarts.
• Allow extra space in the jar for possible pressurized chemical activity.
  
• No option ~~~ Required: Add vinegar or some other brand of acid---probably best to refrain from using the sulfuric and battery varieties, though. My daughter Annie and friend Chris can tell you why either of those probably wouldn't do well in your salsa.
• Tomatoes, these days, don't have a lot of acid. According to Mr. Fox and his bride (a master food preserver who had an entire beef roast, complete with carrots, potatoes and gravy, shoot to the ceiling through a dime-sized hole in their pressure cooker which, in turn, caused her to run around the house saying, "Shit, shit, shit!), okay back to Mr. Fox and his bride---they insist that all vegetables are different these days cuz they're all hybrids and they just don't go in those canning jars the way they did in our parents' era.
• If ya want to guarantee safety, just freeze it.
  

Well, folks, I've learned in the past 24-48 hours that the "Greatest Generation" in food preservation is winding down. It's time to take 4-H again. So, I'm suggesting that the folks who run the university extension service come up with a whole new 4-H cooking curriculum for those of us baby salsa boomers who learned our cooking from the Greatest Generation who'd never even heard of salsa, let alone see it explode out of a jar. At least, those of us up here in the north country, that is.

Before going further, it's important that you know why the above rant and disclosure of knowledge has ensued. My mother is not suing me this morning for damages to her kitchen or to her being. I'm off the hook, thanks to that quart jar of salsa sitting on my own kitchen counter. After cleaning up the first lake of overflow salsa liquid that I had discovered early yesterday morning, I read the newspaper and came upstairs to write my blog about salsa problems.

After going downstairs to the kitchen, I noticed, by sight and strong onion smell, that a new lake had formed around that jar. That was my first clue that the jar needed to be out of the house before taking any further action. My dilemma was where to put it. What if I just put it outside and it exploded and killed one of the crows flying overhead? Now, that could be messy!

So, I carefully took it to the quansit storage shed where we have a couple of garbage cans. Two or three times while I was unscrewing the lid, liquid stuff oozed out, much like steam and sizzle from a car radiator. Finally, I conjured up the nerve to take the top completely off. The instant I released the lid, solid salsa shot out the rim and flowed into the garbage can.

I wasted no time going to my mother's after calling my sister and finding that she had never taken her gift salsa jar to her house. Mother was snoozing away in her post-morning-diurrhetic state, so I went to her kitchen to find that just a little liquid had oozed from her jar. But that jar sure was hot. I carefully carried it outside (with a few 'Hail Mary's), set it on her deck and twisted the rim.

Just like those car radiators, steamy stuff sizzled out the sides. It took two or three twists, with release time in between, to finally remove the rim. Once removed, the lid and at least one inch of salsa shot out of the jar. I took it to a brush pile, emptied it and thought about the resident skunk which would probably find it, scarf it down and blow up in Mother's yard. She's been trying to get rid of that skunk for a couple of years now.

I also thought about President Bush and his quest to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Here was the key. Send Marianne's salsa over there to the desert, disperse it in key areas, and with all that 100-plus heat, think of the commotion it could cause. Of course, considering this stuff had been in the jars just three days would require some pretty quick transport for the safety of our troops.

Mother was quite pleased all day that I had saved her life and her kitchen ceiling. She still talks about the time she came to Helen Crockett's house so many decades ago and found Helen crying in her kitchen as pea soup from the pressure cooker dripped from up above.

In fact, Mother was so pleased yesterday that she told the salsa story to the stove repairmen. I was there at the time, and that's where I learned all about Mr. Fox and his bride. Mr. Fox shared many lessons about food preservation with me as his repair partner tinkered with the stove's pilot light.

So, thanks to my prior salsa stupidity, I have learned universal truths about preservation of both tomatoes and human life. Those boxes of ripening tomatoes sit out there in the garage begging for me to try salsa one more time. I don't know if my family feels quite the urgency, however. But I have learned, and I shall go forth into the realm of enlightened salsa preparation and preservation.

And, on future days, while sitting cross-legged meditating over a sack of Santillas, I'll grab chip after chip, load them down with a glob of my homemade non-explosive salsa, gobble away, smile and thank my friends Joan, Laura, Florine, Mr. Fox and his bride, and Angela for sharing their infinite wisdom.