Ashley and Judy's homemade pineapple salsa

And other delicious creations...

I have the best mum. I just gotta say it. She's one of my best friends and she rocks. Last weekend my husband was away on a men's retreat with a bunch of guys from our church so after I spent Friday night with three of my best girls, I spent the Saturday cooking up a storm with my mum and we had so much fun. One thing we had always talked about making was salsa. When she was in California she brought home a jar of pineapple salsa for me and we decided that we would try and make our own. Mum tried to find recipes but after searching the internet and finding nothing we decided to make our own. We have already decided what we're going to do differently in our next batch but that's not to say that this one didn't turn out great. Because it did. I'm not going to give an entire recipe for this one as it needs some tweaking plus it's our secret recipe and it wouldn't be secret if I shared the whole thing ;)
Anyway, here goes...

We started with a bunch of tomatoes chopped up and processed until they looked like.....

... this. Same with the onions...

... and the limes.

Well I guess this picture doesn't show them all chopped up but I wanted to include it anyway.

Everything but the pineapple in the pot. We used red and orange peppers as well however they got way too fine in the food processor so for next time I am going to chop them by hand.

A full pot with the pineapple added. I chopped these by hand as they for sure would get waaayyyy too fine and runny in a food processor and we wanted there to be some chunks in the salsa.

Here's the salsa after it had been cooking in the pot for some time. We added salt, pepper, cumin, and maybe something else? I can't quite remember now and we were busy making a bunch of stuff that day so I forgot to write it down. Oh, we also added jalapenos for some spice. I'm not sure how long this stayed on the stove, a few hours at least, we kind of adjusted the heat as we saw fit so next time we'll get it down pat.

The finished product. We ended up with eight jars of salsa. Next time we're going to use my big soup pot thing as well and hopefully make twice as much. We only made this a week ago and I only have one out of four jars left!

Another thing my mum and I concocted. Well mostly my mum in this case. Some sort of Korean barbecued steak, oh my word, so good.

My mum told me that she needed more protein in her diet and quinoa is a very good source of protein. My one health tip so far on this blog. We added green onions, shredded carrots, salt, pepper, etc.

An amazing corn and zucchini bake. Mum adapted this from a Kraft recipe and then decided she was going to bake it with cheese on top. If I hadn't got married I probably never would have left home because she doesn't stop cooking with cheese!!

And one of the most amazing things I've ever eaten I'm pretty sure. A red onion, yellow pepper, beet and blue cheese salad. If there's one thing I love, it's beets. Because they taste like the ground. That really is my number one reason for liking them. I'm fairly certain this came out of my mum's brain all on it's own (Mum, correct me if I'm wrong) and I must say, she's a genius. I only hope that one day I'll be able to create wonderful dishes out of my brain just like she does. I'm like her in basically every way (except for my terrible sense of direction which I get from my dad and my love for birds which I also get from my dad) so hopefully that trait will start to manifest itself even more soon!
That's it for tonight folks. Until next time...

- A