Onion Salsa Criollo

Onion salsa is traditionally served with Peruvian tamales, but it’s great in roasted vegetable or meat pitas or sandwiches. If you threw in some diced tomatoes you’d have a tomato pico de gallo or tomato salsa fresca. It’s a great way to use one of the hot yellow chili peppers in the Lufa Farm box, especially since it’s so hard to find these special yellow chilies in stores in Montreal. It’s not the same chili as the Peruvian aji amarillo, but it works just fine.

I’m usually scared of pickled onions because the taste of sort of raw onions sticks with me for the rest of the day and I hate myself, and specifically my breath, during that period of time. But this onion salsa is simple, delicious, and adaptable to raw onion-haters’ tastes. And if you do love almost raw onions (“almost raw” = pickled, since in this recipe the onions aren’t heated but they are “denatured” by the vinegar according to “raw” foodists), you’ll be in heaven.

Onion Salsa Criollo

Ingredients:

• 2 onions, sliced as fine as possible
• 1/2 tbsp olive oil
• 1 fresh yellow hot chili pepper (or 1 dried aji amarillo, soaked in hot water for 30 minutes, or 1 fresh long, red, hot chili pepper) seeded and finely diced (use gloves!)

• Juice of 2 limes
• Salt

• 1 tbsp vinegar
• 3 sprigs of cilantro or parsley, finely chopped

Directions:

Slice the onions and then toss them into a pot of boiling water for 3 minutes. Remove them to a colander and rinse under cold water. This blanching gets rid of a lot of the sharpness of the onion flavour and longevity of your onion breath. You can skip this step if you like crunchy, overly onion-y breath and have no date that night.

Season the sliced onion with a little salt for 5 minutes in the colander, then rinse in cold water and drain. Place the onion in a bowl and season again with salt, the lime juice and vinegar. Add the diced yellow chili pepper (or aji amarillo), olive oil and cilantro or parsley. Mix well.

Makes 1 ½ cups