Salsa Time

Our garden is overflowing with tomatoes and peppers so I got the crazy idea to make salsa. I have made salsa before with my parents but never on my own. I took a food safety and sanitation course at USU as part of my degree. The professor scared the pants off of me when it comes to canning, especially tomatoes. We heard stories of people killing over from botulism from just taking a taste of contaminated canned tomatoes. So I decided I needed a pressure caner to increase my families chance of survival. So after searching and searching I found a recipe that looked good. And I embarked on the looooong process. I didn't realize just how long it would be. I chopped so many onions and peppers. By the time a got everything chopped and into the pot I was so tierd. Now I had come to the point of how much acid I should add, again to keep from killing my family. My recipe called for vinegar. I wanted to use lemon juice. I knew lemon juice was more acidic than vinegar but I wasn't exactly sure the proportions. So I just added the same amount of lemon juice as the recipe called for vinegar. Now it was all ready to go into the jars and into the pressure caner. This is the part my mom always did. So now I had to figure out how much pressure and for how long. And how much water goes in and how do you get the dang lid on. Mind you this is around 10 pm. I started around noon. Anyways, we figured everything out and around midnight went to bed with 31 pints of homemade salsa on the counter. How does it taste? you may wonder. Well, its not bad. Its definitely got too much lemon. My kids love it though. I think I'll make a smaller batch with a little more spice for Rocky and me.