I should explain something about living in the Netherlands: there is no good Mexican food here. I don’t mean that as a complaint exactly - the Dutch have plenty of things going for them - but if you grew up in Southern California, where the baseline for a Tuesday lunch is a paper plate of chips and a little bowl of roasted tomato salsa that costs nothing and tastes like someone’s abuela made it that morning, the absence wears at you. There’s a specific genre of salsa I’ve been chasing for years. Thin enough to scoop easily, smoky, a little heat, bright from the tomato. Chunks of onion and garlic. Enough cilantro that it classifies as a salad in some states. The kind that comes out automatically at every table before you’ve even opened the menu where I grew up.

I decided to make it myself. This is where things got interesting.

The first mistake was scale. I had a rough idea of what I wanted - roasted tomatoes, onion, garlic, cilantro, lime, chili - and I started roasting. What I did not properly account for was that tomatoes, when roasted, release a significant amount of liquid. Combined with the lime juice. Combined with the fact that I was apparently making salsa for a village. I blended it and stood back to look at what I had produced. Well, eventually stood back, because it took 5 cycles through my little food processor to blend up all those tomatoes. After that much work, I’ll admit I sat down for a few minutes before actually looking at what I had wrought.

It was a bucket. A literal, full, five-liter bucket of salsa. Fairly mild, more broken down and smoother than I wanted but not watery - somewhere between a restaurant salsa and a very enthusiastic tomato soup.

The second mistake was the jalapeños. I had used five of them, which I thought was reasonable. It was not enough. The salsa had essentially no heat, which for this style is wrong - you want a warmth that builds, not a fire alarm, but you want something. The problem was that I’d already blended everything. Even if I got the right kind of peppers ready to add, I couldn’t go back and blend it again or it would turn to a very fancy tomato drink.

So I the next morning I acquired and roasted a spaanse pepers - the Dutch approximation of a proper chili, somewhere between an Anaheim and a poblano in flavor, with more character than a jalapeño when you char them properly - and diced them by hand into the finished salsa. Mixed it in to one of the small jars (because this salsa took up two big jars and two little jars) as evenly as I could. Labeled it as a test batch, and waited a day. The result was very close to what we wanted, and was a hit with my wife, son, and I. Finally, a little taste of home. So I did what any technically-minded fellow would, and attempted to scale my creation. I got a handful of these peppers, roasted them, diced them up, and mixed them into the big batch.

This was not perfectly even.

What I ended up with was a salsa that was, depending entirely on which bite you took, either pleasantly mild or aggressively, face-reddening spicy. No way to tell in advance. My wife and I discovered this together over several evenings of chips and salsa, a ritual that now went like this: take a big confident bite, enjoy it, take another big confident bite, make brief eye contact across the table as one of us slowly turns red, reach for the water, gulp it, set the glass down, and say in a slightly strained voice “I’m fine. It’s delicious.” Then immediately take another chip.

It was delicious. We finished about a liter between the two of us.

My son, who by all prior evidence was not a person who ate spicy food or anything with visible texture or anything that wasn’t on his approved list, tried a chip with salsa on it one evening. I didn’t push it. He picked it up himself, dipped it, ate it, and looked at me.

“Can I have more of that?”

Over the next three days he ate nearly two liters of salsa. This is a child who won’t eat a plain cracker if it’s the wrong brand. He ate so much salsa that I was briefly concerned about vitamin C toxicity before I remembered that’s not really how vitamin C works and also that my son eating vegetables in any form is something I should probably just accept without questioning.

My daughter, meanwhile, looked at the salsa once and decided she didn’t like it. She hadn’t tried it. Maybe something about it’s pleasant aroma offended her. I’m not sure. She frequently takes on a role in this family that I’ve started calling Contrary - after a character in [Little Big Man](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Big_Man_(film), an Indian who does everything opposite to everyone else. She operates on pure opposition. Her brother loves it, therefore she has assessed it without tasting it and filed it under no. If we’re excited about it, she isn’t. So, she has her own salsa now. Store-bought. From a jar. Pretty sure it’s made in England. She prefers it.

I made a second batch with better chili distribution. Less of a roulette situation. My son approved.

My wife and I miss the roulette a little, if we’re honest.