more love for CHOW mag

Hey tarts! I'm back from my long weekend in D.C. and vicinity. I picked up the new issue of CHOW while I was out there. In it was a "reverse-engineered" salsa recipe, emulating what is apparently some amazing salsa sold somewhere in San Francisco's Mission district.

I spent a good portion of my flight home salivating over the picture of said salsa, so I decided I would make it today. I even had a dream last night about making this salsa. (Incidentally, I once had a copy editing/cooking dream in which I was trying to figure out my employer's house style for handling blue cheese. Not printed references to blue cheese -- actual blue cheese. "What do we do when it's too blue?" I wondered. "Will that confuse readers and make them think it's just plain moldy?" Anyway, I digress.)

I'm glad I live in a place with a sizable Latino population, because this salsa called for things I would've had a hard time finding in some places: chiles de arbol, pasilla chili powder, and raw, shelled pumpkin seeds. Here, though, no problem:

Anyway, this recipe has you roast the tomatoes, then cook them again with the chilies, like so:

Meanwhile, you're toasting pumpkin seeds and chopping your green onions and cilantro. Then you stick the tomato mixture and the pumpkin seeds in the blender, along with a little vinegar. I think the pumpkin seeds are really key -- you get a depth of flavor and a nice mouthfeel that's a little like mole.

The verdict? Pretty damn good salsa. I would go a little easier on the salt next time, but I'll definitely be making this again.

Oh, and also, thanks to this issue of CHOW, I am currently curing my own salmon. This basically involves covering salmon fillets in a ton of kosher salt, some sugar and some herbs, weighting it down, and letting it sit in the fridge for 24 hours. I'll let you know tomorrow how that turns out.