It's Tomatillo Time

While everyone else is enjoying gluts of tomatoes from their own yards or someone else's, I'm left with a pile of tomatillos and more hot peppers than anyone should ever consume over a summer.

Our tomatoes are way late, thanks in part to last year's blight. My husband and I decided to give last year's patch a tomato-free season and went big on hot peppers and tomatillos, two plants that weren't at all bothered by the blight. We did tomatoes in large buckets, far from the Blight Zone, and put them in the sunniest spot in the yard and waited…and waited. We pounce like lycopene-starved gremlins on any fruit that's remotely red and hover around the other plants, willing them to go forth and multiply.

The tomatillos are another story. The "green tomato," as it's known to some (or "tomate verde" in its native Mexico), is hardy and prolific and can take a joke when it comes to watering. The tiny little plants you install after Memorial Day grow to be at least 10 times their original size and produce fruit like it's Y2K all over again.

The fruit is where it gets more interesting. The first signs of fruit are bright green leaves, then bright yellow flowers; next come chartreuse "lanterns," paper-y protectors of the fruit that will house the tomatillo flesh. When you can see green tomatillo skin poking through the lanterns, it's time to harvest the tomatillo.

Which takes us back to the pile of them on my counter. As staunch believers in salsa-as-vegetable, priority one at planting time is to set up the staples of a salsa garden: hot peppers, tomatillos, cilantro, and those coy tomatoes. Somehow, though, we're always amazed at how many tomatillos emerge in a season, so we make salsa with them, also like it's Y2K all over again. We'll do salsa verde, salsa fresca, and mango salsa and sometimes get really ambitious and make tamales with lovely fire-y sauces to go with.

With this much trial and error, we know this much is true: the key to great savory salsas is roasted ingredients. Before you twirl up your ingredients in the food processor, roast them and roast them good-preferably on a grill with smoky wood chips billowing away over the coals. The scent is incredible as the peppers and onions blacken, and the fire softens up those tough little tomatillos in no time.

Production note: Before grill time, de-husk the tomatillo and soak the fruit in a bowl of water. You'll notice a waxy film on the tomatillo, which is perfectly normal. A short soak and a rinse will work off the sticky stuff with a bit of scrubbing.

Salsa is a particularly fun project because you can tweak the ingredients to create an accompaniment for a meal or for basic chip-and-dipping. The house salsa we prep is a salsa verde hybrid: it's mostly tomatillos and hot peppers with a dash of tomato to keep the heat of the peppers in check, plus onions, cilantro, garlic, and a dash of lime juice. Salsa is so much about personal taste (and heat stamina) that I hesitate to draft a Universal House Salsa recipe, but take a look at our video for a sense of how common salsas come together. Got your own recipe ideas? Send them in…with bags of tortilla chips, preferably.

This is the opinion of Marisa Nadolny.