Salsa!

I think my salsa is finally ready for prime time:

• 6 cups peeled, fine chopped, & drained paste tomatoes
• 1 1/2 cups fine chopped onions (I used White Sweet Spanish)
• 1 1/4 cup fine chopped peppers (green and red sweet peppers, mostly green)
• 5/8 cup lime juice

• 1 tsp salt
• 46 turns of the pepper mill on a fine grind (yes, I really did count to 46)
• 1 1/2 large cloves garlic, pressed, plus 1 more clove added at the end of cooking (by "large clove" I mean the kind you get with a hardneck garlic such as German White, where there's only five or six cloves per head. The kind you cut in half to fit them into the press.)
• 1 tsp dried oregano
• 1/2 T whole cumin, fried briefly until aromatic in a miniscule amount of olive oil, then ground in a mortar & pestle. (The added oil may not have been the best idea I've ever had -- it made the grinding tedious -- so I may skip that part next time. My pan was very dry.)
• 2 T jalapeños, very finely chopped (I used Black Hungarians, one red one black, which came out on the mild side of medium)

To prepare the tomatoes: blanch 30-45 seconds in boiling water to loosen the skins. Peel, core and seed, fine chop, and put in a strainer with a bowl underneath. Leave in the fridge overnight to drain out as much liquid as you can. It's easier to get the amount right if you start with more than you need and make the extra into tomato sauce. I used eight or so large Goldman's Italian American tomatoes, which are very dense.

Add the remaining ingredients, reserving a clove of garlic to add at the end. Marinate in the fridge for a few hours.

Simmer, stirring frequently, until you're happy with the texture (between one and two hours.) Add the last clove of garlic when you turn the heat off.

Transfer to wide-mouth cup jars (these are the best size for dipping the chips,) leaving an inch of head room for expansion when it freezes. (I got seven jars plus a half jar for tasting.) Put lids on and label them, then leave in a draft-free place, spaced an inch or so apart, until they cool to room temperature. Store in freezer. Thaw in the fridge a day ahead of when you plan to use them, and stir when you open to make sure it's fully thawed (buzzing briefly in the microwave if necessary.)

------------------------------

The first time I tried making salsa, back in 2012, it was a demoralizing experience. I had no idea what recipe to use. There was a lot of variation in what I found online, and I didn't have any recipes where I'd actually tasted the result. I didn't realize I needed to drain the tomatoes in the fridge, and the weather was so hot they got moldy and I had to start over. And for that first attempt, I chose a recipe that's acidic enough to can and store at room temperature, and I didn't like the flavor. It was a huge production -- hours of labor -- which ended in disappointment.

The second try, in 2013, was a bit more successful. That time I used a freezer recipe, and the flavor came out better. But I expected to be able to cook it minimally, and that didn't turn out to be the case. As soon as it got hot it turned watery, and I kept simmering and simmering it, wondering what I'd done wrong, until I finally gave up after about an hour and just put it in the jars anyway, even though it was still too thin.

I didn't end up using it much, partly because it was watery and partly because I had to plan a day ahead to thaw it out. Then I found a salsa made by Culinary Kiosk, a local company that I adore, and I decided to just leave the salsa making to the experts.

And that's how things were until about three weeks ago. When I was cleaning out the deep freeze for the move, I found a couple remaining jars of the 2013 salsa, and decided to use them up. The same day, my kid (who now goes by the name Sherlock) decided to open a jar of the Culinary Kiosk salsa. So we ended up with two jars open at once. Time for a taste comparison.

The first thing I noticed was that the Culinary Kiosk salsa was sweeter than mine (and sure enough, there was sugar on the ingredient list.) It was also thicker -- the consistency of a catsup or a thick tomato sauce -- where mine was chunky and (still) watery (after all these years.)

Then Sherlock pushed the Culinary Kiosk jar away when I offered it to them, and said the one from the freezer was better.

Oh. Okay. Thank you.

That, along with a surplus of unusually dense paste tomatoes from my garden, was all the inspiration it took to get me back into salsa-making mode. And I'm finally satisfied with today's version of the recipe. I might have to make another batch.

My Problem with Ayn Rand

I remember reading, and enjoying, Ayn Rand's novels when I was a teenager. As a creative genius myself, it was easy to identify with her creative genius characters. And, like them, I found it hard to fit in to a social environment that prized conformity.

However, some years later, I learned she was an idol of the Libertarians. I was deeply puzzled, since that movement strikes me as hopelessly muddled and unrealistic. Libertarians appear to believe that people, left to their own devices, will act out of enlightened self-interest and shape society into a utopia. And I found it difficult to understand the connection between the works that I had read and this reactionary, just-short-of-anarchist political philosophy.

This past week I was again subjected to a social situation that reminded me strongly of The Fountainhead. A group of community members are looking for a scapegoat, and as the strongest contributor in their domain of dissatisfaction, I'm directly in the cross-hairs. The other obvious scapegoat has departed the scene, leaving behind a vacuum that appears to have sucked me in.

Scapegoating is an inherently small-minded activity. It's an attempt to solve a problem through destruction, when (pretty much across the board) a constructive solution is what's actually needed. So it's incredibly easy, in this situation, to understand Ayn Rand's frustration with the way small-minded individuals band together to destroy anyone who's competent enough to step into a leadership role.

But I also gained some insight, this time around, into the discrepancy between Ayn Rand's writing and the Libertarian belief system.

In a third person novel, the author invites the reader to step into the shoes of her protagonist and identify with him. So Ayn Rand, in writing The Fountainhead, is inviting everyone who reads her to imagine themselves as a misunderstood and persecuted creative genius. In so doing, readers also imagine that the world would be dramatically improved if they were simply freed from the misguided constraints imposed on them by smaller-minded peers, and allowed to soar.

But there's a problem with that logic. One I hadn't noticed before, even though it's obvious in retrospect. And that problem is that creative geniuses are few and far between. I happen to be one of them in real life: I'm dramatically more competent than the vast majority of my peers at pretty much every intellectual task I tackle. And all my life I've been plagued by people who couldn't stand that fact about me, and who've tried to take me down in any way they could.

But Libertarians imagine that everyone is such a genius, and would rise to that zone of competence if left to their own devices. Which simply isn't true. The majority of humanity is capable of literacy at around an eighth grade level, and more than that is beyond their ability. Readers of Ayn Rand lie on the high side of average intelligence: The Fountainhead is, after all, a tome. But even most of them aren't capable of anything approaching the level of functioning her genius protagonists have mastered.

So what we're left with is a political philosophy that's based on a statistical fallacy. Which is, quite simply, a conflation of the average with the exception case that lies three standard deviations above it.

Humanity, left to its own devices without organizational structures, would not self-organize to a genius level of functioning. It would settle to the mean. And the mean are the exact same small-minded individuals Ayn Rand was warning us about.