Making My Own Salsa

I have several ideas in my head about how to save money and be frugal, especially if we go down to one income some day. I already make quite of bit of bread from scratch (dinner rolls, breakfast loafs, rosemary bread, corn bread, garlic bread sticks, etc.) but this weekend, I tried my hand at homemade salsa. We had just finished a bottle of green salsa (the La Victoria brand, which is really good) and I was in the store, ready to replace it, when I thought of making my own. I had looked on the ingredient label of the salsa before and saw that it wasn't hard and then remembered that I had actually made green salsa before (one time in college, that actually resulted in me throwing away the whole batch because I was using a blender and couldn't get the food to mix so I pushed it down with a wooden spoon...and ended up with thousands of tiny splinters in my salsa). Anyway, I did much better this time. I go 6 tomatillos for about $1.30 and a jalapeno for $.14. I had some left over cilantro in my fridge already, plus a half an onion that was just waiting to be used up. Of course, I always have garlic on hand. I mixed everything up and ended up with tons of salsa! Enough to fill one full jar (I just put it right back into the newly washed salsa jar we had saved) and another half jar, which I've put in the freezer. So, for $1.44, I got 1 1/2 times the salsa that I would have gotten for $3.59 at the store! True, it won't save us millions, but over the years, think of how much money we could save if I made all our own salsa?

Up next? Making my own jam this summer!