Salsa Girls

Like teenagers who have left home for the first time, our tomatoes, in boxes spread throughout the office at the back of our detached garage, are maturing off the vine. Elizabeth barely saved them from a couple of wicked cold nights. We didn't get to the peppers, and they turned into long, discolored, mushy incarnations of their previously sassy selves (sassy ones pictured above). This means salsa season is over, because now if we wanted to make a batch, we would have to buy most of our ingredients from the grocery store, which as yet seems like an awful idea to me, as garden-fresh produce is still too fresh in my memory. But I can't complain. It was a good salsa year. We made a lot of salsa, and we ate a lot of salsa, and almost all of it was very good. It was a good salsa year in another way, too: we discovered that both of our daughters really like the stuff, even when it is of about medium spiciness.
I already knew that Sonora liked salsa, but Rowyn, in her short life, has been a little pickier than Sonora. So I feared our youngest daughter would shy away from this magnificent blend of tomatoes, onions, and peppers. But last August, I gave Rowyn a corn chip lightly dipped in a batch of fresh salsa. She sucked the light red juice off, and then held the empty chip up and said, "Mo, Mo" rather emphatically. So I dipped her chip again and again she licked it clean. Then we gave her a little cup of salsa, which she dipped dry. Finally, Elizabeth gave her the whole 5-quart glass bowl--there was maybe half a cup left in the bottom--but instead of just dipping more chips in, Rowyn heaved this heavy bowl up to her mouth and began drinking the salsa juice. And this wasn't some wussy batch of salsa, either; there were a couple of jalapenos and a few other sort-of-hot peppers in the mix. I was genuinely proud of Rowyn and Sonora. These are MY girls, I thought to myself.

When I say I was proud of them, I'm not exaggerating. I felt the same swelling in my chest when Rowyn gulped down the last of the salsa as when Sonora learned to ride a bike or when she hiked the whole 3.5 mile long Kamiak Butte trail without any assistance. I didn't know I felt so strongly about salsa until that moment, but now that I think about it, this saucy stuff has been with me my whole life. Even in the late 70s early 80s, a decade before most of the U.S. had discovered its now favorite condiment, my family and I were eating salsa. We would put it on tacos and enchiladas, dip corn chips, Frito's, Wheat Thins, saltine crackers, and vegetables in it, and yes, sometimes some of us would even drink a little bit of it.

Every summer my dad, with the help of my mom and some of the kids, would hack away at onions, tomatoes, and chillies. We would throw it all in a big pot and we would can it up, though it never tasted as good after being canned as before. In the winter, though, a can of that salsa tasted like a warm morning. Even my grandma liked to make salsa, though she favored a sweetened green salsa with a tomatillo/shredded zucchini base. Salsa was so important to my parents that they spent an unthinkable amount of time dicing and then drying heaps of salsa ingredients. Their thought was that they could give this as gifts to their children-who were by then mostly all grown up--because dried salsa would be more portable than canned and could be taken with a person in an emergency. That way, even if there was some natural or personal disaster, my parents' children wouldn't be without their salsa.

Perhaps one of the reasons Elizabeth and I get along so well with our in-laws has its roots in salsa, for hers is also a family of salsa connoisseurs. In fact, the recipe I use (with adaptations) comes from the family recipe book Elizabeth's mom put together for her kids several years ago. On more than one occasion, I've experienced a pleasant sense of home-ness while crammed in together with the sisters and Mom Porter in her kitchen chopping salsa vegetables together, and then again a few hours later when we devour together that whole gallon of salsa.

And I guess that is it, that is why I was so happy when I realized that not only Sonora but also Rowyn loves this stuff. It felt like a solid confirmation of heritage: I am my parents' son and my grandparents' grandkid. And these two little tomato-faced girls are ours, not just biologically, but, perhaps more importantly, they are our kids culturally. I won't be putting together bags of dried salsa for them, but when they leave home as young adults, I hope they take with them positive, strengthening associations of home. I hope that they will grow tomatoes and peppers and onions and chop them up together into a medley that will remind them that they belong.