Raspberry salsa

I love allrecipes.com. If you've never visited the site before, I recommend it. Besides having a ton of recipes, it has a lot of reviews. Reviews are all well and good as reviews, but I find them much more useful when people critique and offer other ways to cook the dish as well. You find out then if several people thought the cookie dough too runny or too dry and adjust accordingly. You find out if someone else cooked it with brown rice instead of white rice and how that affected the outcome. I know there are magazines you can buy that do the same thing except by a panel of professional cooks. but I am poor. And this website does a fair job.

This recipe comes from that website. Submitted by "Karen." I found it because my mother-in-law's raspberry bushes have been going crazy and we have had a plethora of fresh raspberries. I also made a yummy raspberry-banana bread. I forgot to take pictures of that, so I'll have to make it again... rats.

Anyway, recipe:

Ingredients

• 2 cups fresh raspberries
• 1/4 cup chopped sweet onion
• 3 teaspoons finely chopped jalapeno chile peppers
• 1 clove minced garlic
• 1/4 cup chopped fresh cilantro
• 1/2 teaspoon white sugar
• 3 TBL Fresh lime juice

Directions:

1. In a medium bowl, mix together raspberries, sweet onion, jalapeno chile peppers, garlic, cilantro, white sugar and lime juice. Cover and chill in the refrigerator at least 1 hour before serving.

I bought a lime to juice and put in the salsa, but I forgot. The salsa turned out good anyway. It's sweeter that normal salsa, which is to be expected, but still has a nice zing to it. And it was still very tasty on chips. The recipe also recommends putting it on chicken or steak, which would be yummy but I didn't try. I also decided there weren't enough peppers in it so I added some orange bell pepper too. I probably doubled the garlic as well. But I forget now. I really ought to keep better notes.

What I was most worried about was the pepper and the onion being too crunchy. I don't know if it was the berries or the sugar (or both) but the onions and peppers softened just right. I'm sad the raspberry bushes are done producing because it will be harder to make this yummy salsa. The results should be similar if you make it with frozen, thawed berries, although I've not yet tried.

Here is Dana's pretty picture of it.

Lentil Chili Soup

Got this recipe out of the newspaper a few months ago and just had time to try it.
Here is the recipe and instructions as it appeared:

1 cup lentils, any variety
8 cups stock
2-3 jalapeno or serano chiles, stemmed, seeded and rough chopped
1/2 a small onion, finely chopped
1 Tbls fresh ginger, grated
1 tsp ground tumeric
1 tsp toasted cumin, ground
salt and pepper to taste
kefir (Russian yogurt stuff) as garnish

Combine all ingredients except kefir and salt and pepper. Bring to boil. Reduce heat to medium low, cover and cook for 45 minutes to an hour or until lentils are soft. If liquid appears too thick, add as much a cup of water or stock. Remove soup from heat, let cool for 10-15 minutes. Puree small batches in blender . Return soup to pot and season with salt and pepper to taste. heat to serving temperature. Top servings with sour cream. Serve with tortillas.

I didn't have stock so I used 8 cups of water and 3 Tbl of bullion instead. I used jalapenos. I did not have fresh ginger either. So I used 1 tsp ground ginger instead. I also used regular old ground cumin instead of toasting the seeds then grinding them myself. Our stove is a hot stove so after I got it to boil I put it on its very lowest setting for the 45 minutes where it boiled quietly the whole time. I skipped the blender step. I'd rather see what's in my soup than guess in the midst of a puree. But feel free to blend if that's what you're into. I actually could have bought the kefir, but Dana says it's pretty gross, so we just used sour cream. I tried the finished soup with both tortillas and tortilla chips and I liked the chips better than the plain tortilla, but both were good.

My recommendation: yummy! Hot enough to make you sweat a little but not so hot your tongue hates you afterward. The finished soup is a cooked-spinach green shade, so it may take some convincing for children, but it smells delicious and tastes yummy too!