Garden-fresh salsa

The simplest things are often the best. I've learned this lesson over and over again out here. I used to think that I needed to have a recipe for everything I cooked, other than the most basic dishes. For several years, I tried a variety of salsa recipes, but never was excited about any of them. Then one day several years ago, one of my daughters (probably the oldest, but I don't remember exactly) just chopped up a bunch of tomatoes, onions, garlic, and peppers, sprinkled on a little salt and started dipping. That was the end of my search for salsa recipes.

As Alice Walker says in her books, the key to good food is to start with the freshest ingredients. If you start with a bunch of tomatoes that were picked green and gassed to turn red, your salsa won't taste very good. But when you start with vine-ripened tomatoes fresh from the garden, the response is, "Mmmm!"

This particular salsa was made with a few red tomatoes, a couple of orange banana tomatoes, and a few green zebra tomatoes, which creates the beautiful rainbow of colors. We're already out of red onions, so Katherine snipped some of our green onions for this particular batch of salsa. And we all agreed she went a little overboard with the peppers this time by chopping up three fresh jalapeños, but we all kept going back for more as soon as our mouth recovered.