Salsa Verde – Anyone from the Southwest is familiar with it. Tomatilla salsa, whatever you want to call it, it’s green, it’s yummy, goes good on chips or on top of any tex/mex meal. I owe this recipe to the ‘I Love Grilling Meat’ facebook group that I’m a part of – it was part of an email message that I just happened to look at one day while busting loose.

It seemed easy enough, and involved charring a bunch of ingredients on the grill – something that’s easy to do! The base of the grilled items is a bunch of tomatillos, a poblano, a couple jalapeños, and a serrano pepper. After you char all those things until they’re good and soft, you pull all the stems off and drop them into a food processor with garlic, pepper, salt, adobo seasoning, lime juice and a fist full of cilantro and let her rip.

Here’s what I decided to try for this batch:

You can see that I was aiming for a double batch, added some onion and used shishito peppers instead of serrano peppers – oh well.

What do I mean by ‘charring’?  simple – light up the Weber and get a beer handy!

Am I one of the last people that take pride in ‘building’ my fires? It appears that everyone uses these ‘chimney’ starters that take all the fun of gracefully stacking coals strategically over a fire-starter. I guess it’s quicker, but I’ve always like stacking my pyramids of coal – it’s a meditative element of the cook that doesn’t seem to be part of the cook anymore, and that’s kind of a bummer!

Once the fire is nice and hot, get everything on there! Keep flipping and moving everything around until it’s nice and charred. The tomatillos will pop and sizzle and you’ll lose a little moisture, but you want them to be really really squishy before you take them off.

You can see, everything is pretty deflated by the time I decided to take everything off:

And then it’s into the food processor with everything,  I put 2 limes worth of juice in, chopped all the big stuff down into smaller chunks, added some seasoning – Like I mentioned above – salt, pepper, adobo, garlic powder and a big ol’ fist of cilantro and purée until uniform. Taste, add seasoning if necessary… and wallah –

Fire roasted everything salsa! Salsa verde! Tomatillo Salsa! Yummy stuff! what ever you want to call it – let it sit in the fridge overnight (or until reasonably chilled if you can’t wait)..  then dip that chip in!

Check out the close up:

Such a fresh and tasty flavor a lot of people enjoy it – give it a shot!