If you don’t have fresh local tomatoes grown outside in the sunshine, don’t bother making this recipe.  I’m not being a tomato snob, I’m really not.  With recipes where you roast or cook tomatoes you can coax more flavor out of less than stellar fruits, but when making recipes with fresh tomatoes you need the very best. 

I learned to make this fresh tomato salsa from my friend Norman’s good friend Margie, about 19 years ago.   

Fresh Tomato Salsa
yields one big bowl of salsa

Ingredients:

6 ripe slicing tomatoes
1 small red onion
2 Serrano chilies
1 bunch cilantro, minced
1 lime
1/2 tsp salt

Method:

Cut the tomatoes width-wise, exposing the pockets of seeds, and over the sink or your compost squeeze the seeds out.  After removing the core, dice them into 1/2″ pieces, put in a large bowl. 

Dice the red onion fine, and add it to the bowl with the tomatoes.    

Roast the Serrano chilies by pushing onto a skewer (metal or wood, doesn’t matter) and hold over an open flame.  Turn the chilies around so all of the skin is charred.  Once the peppers are blackened and cooled enough not to give you a second degree burn from handling, rinse them in cold water, peeling the charred skin off.  Mince them into very fine bits and add them to the bowl.

Mince the cilantro very fine and add to the bowl with everything else.

Quarter the lime and squeeze it into the bowl.

Add the salt.

Now stir it up really well and eat it right away.