Homemade Salsa

When I cook for Thanksgiving, I like to have the main meal around 3pm and I have appetizers ready at noon.  One of the appetizers I decided to have this year was chips and salsa con queso.  I made the salsa con queso using homemade salsa.  This was only my second attempt at salsa but it went over quite well.  I was even told it would be a great Christmas gift!

This was a small batch so I used 2 Roma tomatoes, about 1/3 of a sweet onion, 1 Anaheim pepper, 1 jalapeno pepper, 2 cloves of garlic, 1 can of tomato paste, a healthy handful of cilantro and the juice from one small lime.  I coarsely chopped up all of my ingredients and threw them in a pan, leaving all the seeds and innards of the peppers, with the tomato paste.  Squeezed my lime juice in there and let it simmer for a few hours.  I did discover that it was a little too thick for easy dipping so I added a little bit of water and some salt to bring out the flavors and voila!  Super tasty homemade salsa!  This is cheaper and tastier than store bought salsa so from now on, I think it will be homemade salsa for us!