After enthusiastically wolfing down a couple cups of this earlier today, a friend asked for the recipe, so after writing down what I do, I figured I might as well paste the body of that email right here:

This will stop the salsa from almost immediately turning into soup: To remove excess water from the seeded and diced tomatoes – see photo below – salt them with a teaspoon of kosher salt, mix it in, and then put them in a mesh strainer, pushed up on the sides of the strainer to make an even layer, over a bowl for 45 minutes to an hour. This will extract a cup or more of liquid from four fresh-off-the-vine tomatoes. If you use roma tomatoes, which are drier and more dense, you generally don’t have to do this.

The tomatoes and bi-color corn I used this morning were still warm from the field at Willard Farm.

Tomato and Corn Salsa
Yield: 5 or 6 cups

• 4 medium tomatoes, seeded and diced, excess water removed
• 3 ears corn – shuck, then over a sheet pan (less cleanup), hold by the pointy end and slice off the kernels, rotating the cob as you go
• 1 medium red onion, diced
• 1 jalapeño pepper, some but not all of its rib removed, finely diced (the rib, not the seeds, is where most of the heat is)
• 1 clove garlic, finely minced, then mix in a pinch of kosher salt and smush with the back of a knife to make a paste
• 3 tablespoons chopped cilantro/coriander
• Juice of one lime
• Additional kosher salt if needed (it usually needs a bit more) and freshly ground pepper to taste

Let this sit for an hour or so and the salt and lime juice will mellow the harshness of the onion and garlic.

Those chips were On the Border Café Style Tortilla Chips, which I prefer over Xochitl because they hold up much better in the oven when making chicken nachos, &c. The thinner Xochitl sort of wilt under high heat. I wasn’t surprised a few months ago when the On the Border chips were the America’s Test Kitchen taste test winner.

The excess liquid from four tomatoes: