Healthy Eating: Salsa

I know I've blogged about the ridiculous amount of vegetables my husband and I eat on a daily/weekly basis.  While I absolutely love veggies, eating them the same way all of the time can get incredibly boring.  Enter: Trader Joe's.  I fell in love with Trader Joe's fresh salsa while at a birthday party for one of our friends.  It was so fresh and tart that I could not drag myself away from the food table.  Earlier this week, as I was doing our weekly grocery shopping, I ran across the salsa in the hummus/semi-fresh pasta/pizza dough refrigerated case at TJ's.  As I reached for it, I stopped to look at the ingredients: apple cider vinegar, cilantro, tomatoes, peppers, etc.  All of it was real food - which is very important to me & my husband.  I decided that I could make it more cheaply and probably even a little more healthily than TJ's.

For my fresh salsa, I chopped 3/4 of an onion, a green pepper, two small vine tomatoes and added a can of rinsed black beans.  I topped it all with apple cider vinegar - I didn't measure, but instead just poured as I added the veggies to the container.  The total cost of TJ's 12 oz container is about $2.99.  The cost of my 64 oz of salsa: $2.00.  The breakdown is about $.24 an ounce versus $.04 an ounce - for over five times the amount of healthy, low sodium, natural salsa.  The best part: it tastes great added to an arugula salad as dressing.  The black beans make it extra filling, as well.

I am a firm believer that cooking and buying smarter is much more affordable than couponing . . . which leads me to my next blog post.