Salsa Two Ways

Hola, I'm Daisy Martinez for eHow.com. Today we're going to be making two very different but delicious salsas. Salsa basically means sauce in Spanish. I'm going to start out doing a tomatillo salsa which is cooked different from the kind of salsa that you might be familiar with you know for tailgating or football games, or Super Bowl weekend, whatever. So to start with our tomatillo sauce I'm going to start out with a tomatillo which kind of looks like a big green tomato, wrapped in this papery husk. In fact tomatillos are not related to tomatoes, they're, rather they're in the gooseberry family and now that I mentioned that it kind of looks like a big giant green gooseberry, right, because it's got this papery stuff over it. And what you want to do, you just remove that and sometimes they'll feel tacky. If they do, just rinse them off in cold water, pat them dry and then let me just show you what the tomatillo looks like. It's a lot more meaty and it's got all these little seeds and the flavor of a tomatillo is really astringent and you're just going to go ahead and pop this in and then we have some beautiful, my herb of choice, stems and all those delicate tender stems that have tons and tons of flavor, we're just going to pop those right in there and I'm going to give it a whirl. Now what is in my salsa, I have Spanish onion, I have jalapeno, I have tomatillo of course and I have a squish of lime and let's give it a go. Okay, and what we want is the salsa to be well pureed. Now I'm going to go ahead, I'm going to pour it in here and you see the color is bright green. I want you to note that because it's going to change color a little bit. I don't want you to get freaked by that. Okay, so we have that, we're going to set that to boil. So in the amount of time that we've allotted, about 15 minutes, the color of the salsa is going to turn from this beautiful bright green to a more olive color and I'll show you what I mean. While that's cooking down I'm going to go ahead and make what you may be familiar with, it's a more traditional salsa. I have some chopped tomato. I have a chopped jalapeno. I know I could rub it behind my ears. I have some chopped onion and some cilantro, and that's as much as you have to do to that. Now both of these salsas are delicious and you can have these with chips of course, twice fried plantains, plantain chips. Let's go ahead and wow, that's the lime that got away, okay? And salt, and that's basically, that's as much as you have to do to that. Now while this is delicious with chips you can also use this for a weeknight dinner. Think of a grilled protein whether it be a chicken breast, pounded thin, a piece of grilled fish, some grilled short ribs. These salsas are absolutely delicious, why well because the flavors of something like that are fatty and unctuous in your mouth and this offers just the right amount of acid to cut through that and offer a balance that makes the whole thing interesting. So 15 minutes later, now pay close attention, I want to show you what's happened to our salsa. Can you see that beautiful olive color? Can you see that? And it smells absolutely divine. I'm going to go ahead and bring our salsas here and the tomatillo salsa you can actually make ahead the night before, it only gets better. Okay so we have our tomatillo salsa and we have our beautiful weeknight simple salsa. Sometimes this is called also pico de gallo depending on where in Latin America, who in Latin America you're talking to. We have ten different names for the exact same thing, a different name in every country. I'm Daisy Martinez for eHow.com and I'm making salsa.