After the CBC team followed Ryan and me on a dumpster run, I was contacted by another dumpster diver who wanted to ask a few questions and we ended up swapping some recipes. When you end up with a bumper crop of bananas, you need some creative ways to use them all because you can only eat so much banana bread! This recipe came from her.

It's not as good as the fresh salsa, but it does last longer which can be helpful if you have a lot of tomatoes to use and want to save some jars for the future. I believe this one originated with the "More With Less" cookbook.

For Christmas 1994 Jonathan gave Elbert a gift he really enjoyed.  It was a bag of potting soil, 12 pots, and a note telling him that each month he would receive some seeds.  As a bonus, he got some for that month as well.  They were for “hot peppers”.  Those hot peppers were his most treasured plants.  They were started in the house, then transplanted and kept on the deck for the summer.  Elbert watched them closely, then harvested the 14 peppers that were produced.  In the late fall, he and Gwen chopped them up for a triple recipe of this salsa.

The chef at the New Orleans School of Cooking said there are two trinities.  The Divine one we knew, and the other, he said, gives a divine flavour and is found in many of the world’s favourite dishes.  It is a combination of onion, celery, and sweet pepper.  Add tomato and oregano and it is Italian.  Add chili and tomato for Spanish or Mexican.  Add curry for Indian.  Add cream for French.  By making a blender puree of those four vegetables, and then canning it, I use up a lot of end-of-the-season garden produce and have a head start on many sauces.  The kids don’t pick out the chunks.

Mom and I love main dishes loaded with lots of vegetables.  We served this for supper when Dawn, Rachel, Jon, and Erika visited our house in celebration of Gert’s birthday.