Roasted Tomatillo Cilantro Salsa – $.21 per serving

One of my new favorite condiments is an incredibly light and fresh salsa made from tomatillos. A tomatillo is a small Mexican green fruit that’s wrapped around a paper-like husk. It’s not sweet, by the way, but tastes similar to green tomatoes with a little kick. You can find these at just about any grocery store in the U.S. and they’re quite cheap.

Here’s what they look like at your grocery store. Let’s start by preheating your oven to broil. 

Unwrap the “husks”, rinse them, and cut them in quarters.

Place them on a cookie sheet with roughly chopped onion and garlic. Drizzle with olive oil and salt.

Place them in a preheated oven on Broil for at least 8-10 minutes, or until the onions start to brown and liquid flows from the tomatillos. In the meantime, take a large handful of FRESH cilantro (not that dried stuff) and put it in your blender. If you have it, throw some fresh spinach in there. Why not! This should take up at least 1/2 of the blender.

Once the tomatillos are roasted, drop them into the blender with the cilantro and spinach.

Slaughter this for a minute or so. You may need to add about 1/2 cup or water, more or less, until it moves freely in the blender. It should look something like this. Taste test, and add spices and salt as you wish. If you like it spicy, add some chopped jalapeno pepper or hot sauce. I prefer simply adding salt and a dash of hot sauce and cumin.

Serve this over just about anything! Yesterday I had it over a salad which had 1/2 chopped tomato, 1/2 chopped avocado, black beans, 1/8 chopped green pepper and a handful of chopped fresh spinach. I ate this salad with my Blue Collar Baked Chicken and it was pretty amazing! This salsa works great for parties too, as it’s very mild and very healthy!

The price for a large bowl of this salsa cost around $2.10. You could easily get 10 servings or more out of this batch, so one serving would be approximately $.21!

$1.25 – 10 tomatillos
$.50 – Fresh cilantro
$.67 – Whole onion ($.15)
$2.79 – Spinach ($.20)