¡Muy Caliente! or I Never Salsa Much Fun

First off, allow me to do a little blog pimping here and suggest you read the talented, beautiful, smart Hilary Marie and her new blog, “Seeds in the City” In it, she catalogs her attempts at starting up a garden of her own in the unforgiving Concrete Jungle of NYC. So before you do anything, subscribe and tattoo the URL to your inner eye lids so you won’t forget to visit.

Now, onwards with the show….

Hilary has been sporting a major green thumb lately (still need to get some ointment for that) and has been purchasing seeds and tiny plants to grow in some sort of urban Secret Garden. I admit, at first I wasn’t too interested, being I suffer from hay fever and flowers and I get along as well as Glenn Beck and Keith Olberman locked in a room together. But when she started picking up vegetables, I felt my inner Martha Stewart begin to beg for a release. (Trust me, it’s a good thing.)

It started off innocently enough with some German Queen tomatoes. If you’re not familiar with this particular strand, then let me just say they are HUGE. Like HUGE, HUGE. Like bigger than a baseball huge. These tomatoes are so big, you may just need George Clooney to stop them!

Now from the tomatoes, I splurged and picked up cayenne pepper seeds, jalapeño plants, cilantro, chives and oregano without even realizing that I had all the ingredients to make salsa! But instead of just MAKING salsa, I could make my own salsa and then sell it. For money.

As of now, my salsa business is still in the infant stages, with no real direction besides some seeds and a dream. I have done some researching and it doesn’t look too complicated to make it, just a bit of trial and error to find the perfect recipe and the right equipment.  One receipe I found calls for at least 15 lbs of tomatoes to make 8 individual quart jars, so if my initial tomato harvest doesn’t come through, I may have to make a stop at Trader Joe’s for some tomato boosters.

Honestly, the biggest challenge I’m finding is coming up with a name for my salsa brand. Obviously since I’m a one-trick pony, it will inevitably involve zombies in some shape or fashion, but I cannot create the exact formula for a catchy name. One initial idea was “Solanum Salsa” or “Solanum Spice”, but outside of zombie fan-boys like me, I’m not sure if the average consumer would get it. See, that’s my greatest difficulty. I want the name to be a reference to zombies, but not one so obscure that you’d have to be Quentin Tarantino just to decipher it. So if anyone here has a suggestion, please feel free to leave me a comment with your idea. If I like it, I will send you a free jar of my salsa. Oh and I’d need a logo too. I’m thinking a zombie wearing a sombrero.

Catchy name aside, I have decided that the alpha-test launch will contain three varieties: Mild, Medium and Hot. Of course, they’d have clever names, all of which would be zombie related. (I was debating on naming the hot variety as Zom-B-Hurtin’) Then, if these three took off and I managed to get the hang of things, I would gradually expand to more robust flavors.

So that’s where The Great Salsa experiment stands. If all goes according to plan, it’ll be 70+ days before I am ready to harvest my veggies and herbs, so I have time to plan this out. Until then, I follow The Three W’s of Gardening: Water, Watch and Wait. This should be fun. And spicy!