I just made some fresh homemade salsa with yummy tomatoes and onion and jalapeno and all that good stuff! I'm so proud. I had a bit too much onion at first but I scooped out the excess. And I had to add some extra jalapeno. But in the end it was a success! A very spicy success.

Anyone else made something new in the kitchen lately?

Yuuum~. That sounds delicious!

Very nice--glad it worked out

As far as I go...not really. I was baking up a storm a few days before the holidays though

Congrats! I grow a salsa garden every summer!
Last night I made homemade Falafel, which my husband and I loved, my girls did not.

Salsa garden, ooohhhhh that sounds like a fab idea!

Haha I don't like falafel that much either but I think it was the texture that bugged me, so maybe another time I will try it again. I can't imagine making it though, was it hard?

and melodys_angel anyone who can tackle holiday baking definitely wins a gold star!

lemontwist wrote:

Anyone else made something new in the kitchen lately?

Yesterday I had a different lean cuisine that I don't usually buy. It was lasagna. It was a little more challenging because in one step I had to cook it on 50% power for like 6 minutes, and had to figure out which buttons to push on my microwave. *groan*

It was good lasagna but I probably wouldn't buy it again.

PawPrince wrote:

Yesterday I had a different lean cuisine that I don't usually buy. It was lasagna. It was a little more challenging because in one step I had to cook it on 50% power for like 6 minutes, and had to figure out which buttons to push on my microwave. *groan* It was good lasagna but I probably wouldn't buy it again.

Sounds tough!

<3 homemade salsa. And if you've never tried the herb cilantro, it's excellent chopped up and put in salsa. When I make mine, I chop up onions, tomatoes, and cilantro (and sometimes an avocado), and add just a splash of oil and vinegar, and then some salt.

bewilderness wrote:

<3 homemade salsa. And if you've never tried the herb cilantro, it's excellent chopped up and put in salsa. When I make mine, I chop up onions, tomatoes, and cilantro (and sometimes an avocado), and add just a splash of oil and vinegar, and then some salt.

Oh yeah! I use so much cilantro it's not even funny. It's the best part. I didn't do vinegar though, I do a squeeze of lemon My stepdad did it with vinegar once though and it was really good.

Falafel isn't hard to make and it's cheap. I soaked dried chickpeas till they swelled up and then drained and ground them up with fresh parsley, onion, garlic, cumin, coriander, flour and salt and formed patties which I fried. Then I stuffed them into pita pockets with lettuce, onion, tomatos, tahini and topped it with tatziki (yogurt, cucumber and mint)

My salsa uses Tomato, onion, garlic, jalapeno, cilantro and lime juice.

YUM! It sounds delicious!! Is it relatively easy to make salsa? I've been wanting to try my hand at making some, since canned/jarred salsa always seems to taste a bit fake to me.
Well, honestly I haven't tried cooking anything new lately (I'm quite terrible when it comes to eating...I tend to go for stuff that comes out of the microwave lol). Though I *did* go to my mom's school for an afternoon, and helped her kids make homemade croutons using seeded bread, and then we made spice cake for dessert. It all turned out really well, those kids really know how to make good croutons! Mom teaches culinary arts for a special-needs Career school, so it's always fun when she brings home a little bit of what the kids made that day. OMG they made the BEST sloppy joes (with homemade sauce) the other day. Manwich has nothing on these kiddos!

mmmmmm! Lemontwist that sounds SO good, you have my belly rumbling. I'm been eating pepperoncini peppers straight from the jar for the past week xD maybe I should use the remainder to make some salsa myself! I do love spicy food you should post the recipe

Pinkie21 wrote:

YUM! It sounds delicious!! Is it relatively easy to make salsa?

My salsa is easy! It's pretty much just a basic salsa, sort of pic de gallo, sort of whatever-works-and-is-easy lol.

And okay I'll post the "recipe" in more detail.

I use 2 tomatoes to start with, it's usually just me or me and my mom/step dad snacking on it so it makes about enough for 2 or 3 people to mindlessly snack on. Or one person, if you're me lol. Dice 'em up into pieces oh, not too big, my mom says fingernail sized. Then however much tomato you end up with, use half as much onion (or less, I'm not really an onion person, I use about 1/3 as much as I use tomato) And chop it up REALLY TINY. Unless you like crunching into an unexpected chunk of onion. (At this point sometimes my mom or I choose to run it through a blender or food processor, all of the onion and about 1/3 of the tomato, just to have a more liquidy base for the salsa and to avoid unpleasant onion chunks, BUT we don't always do that and you don't have to. But if you do try not to blend it totally smooth.)

Then you take one medium sized clove of garlic, give it a good whack on the counter to break it and peel the outer skin off, mince it up (itty bitty pieces). Then you can either a) mince some jalapeno, as much as you want or can handle, for me it's about 1/4 a smallish pepper, or... b) add a spoonful or two of pre-bought spicy green salsa, which we do when we don't have jalapenos. I suppose you can skip that if you don't want it sicy but then what is the point of salsa? lol. Everything else is pretty much to taste. Salt and pepper (we use white pepper but black will do too), a squeeze or two of lemon (or vinegar, or lime juice, or anything anyone else has mentions like that), and pretty much as much cilantro as you want. I tend to go crazy with the cilantro but you're supposed to just tear off a small fistful and chop it up a bit. I use A LOT.

Stir it a lot in the process of making it of course.

Long post is long and hopefully understandable lol. long story short it is easy but it takes a bit of guesstimating for everyone's individual tastes. So if you don't like recipes that aren't super specific you might be better off with something else lol.

Cuddlebuggy that falafel does sound pretty easy! You know when I was little I thought falafel was a kind of waffle from another country....

This thread is making me HUNGRY! (probably doesn't help that I haven't eaten lunch yet - and it's already 215!) I have't concocted anything new lately, but there's a good chance that I will now after reading about some of this! I guess I ought to go looking through my cook books soon...

Sounds sooo good. My mom and I adore the salsa at Applebees restaraunts and we found a recipe for it online we wanna try someday.