Tangy! Zippy! (It even works if you use dried cilantro, as I did here!)
Usually, the pangs are for ordinary foods which have suddenly been added to my proscribed list, like yeasty honey-wheat bread fresh from the oven and slathered with butter. I can have the butter (in small amounts). I miss the wheat breads. Especially around the holidays, since fresh bread was one of those things that Grandma Helen excelled at, for the festive tables, and we spent many of those holidays, in my yoot, at her table.
But I digress. This does not cry out for yeast breads.
Some foods, she would never have served, simply because she was a nice German-American wife of a Midwestern farmer, and a product of her time. She never heard of salsa, never heard of tomatillos, or cilantro, or jalapeño peppers, or… quite a bit of the stuff we take for granted when we walk into the produce section of a supermarket today. In fact, I've found quite a few people in my neighborhood who still know nothing about these things. But that's probably because I live out here in the sticks, and people here tend to pay little attention to the latest trends from the coasts.
So, I get to treat the people who sit at the Bat's table with the products of my playtime in the kitchen, the result of my spending entirely too much time surfing food porn on the internet.
This particular dish, my relish, occurred because my pop kindly potted a couple of tomatillo plants for me, this year, and I was looking to use the fruits in something besides my favorite chili and your basic salsa verde recipes… I suppose one might eat this on tortilla chips, or on a chicken taco, or some such. But it's just fine as a light side dish, as a sort of salad.
Heck, it's a relish. Do with it what you please.
Fresh Tomatillo Relish
Ingredients:
about 3 lbs fresh tomatillos, husks removed and thoroughly washed
1 medium sweet onion, finely chopped
1/3 cup fresh cilantro, minced
zest of 1 small lime
juice of 2 small limes
1/4 cup rice vinegar
dash salt
2 small jalapenos, finely minced
Directions:
Rinse the tomatillos in cold water, peel, and keep rinsing them until they are no longer sticky. Cut away the bit where the stem was attached (pretty much the same way you'd rid most tomatoes of their stem cores). Coarsely chop them (into cubes of less than 1 centimeter) and put them in a medium-sized bowl. Add all the other ingredients, and mix well.
Refrigerate at least 1 day before serving, to allow the flavors to blend.
Can be kept in fridge for up to two weeks.
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