Uses: On all grilled meats, chicken BBQ, It is good for dressing up beef, pork and turkey bugers.

A very good all purpose salsa that I use often. With a few changes this recipe is a good guide to make salsa with several different flavors.

Assembling the recipe:

Take the tomatoes and cut them in quarters and with a knife remove the seeds leaving only the tomato pulp then cut into a small dice. Peel and remove the seeds from the cucumber and cut into a small dice. Take the avocado and remove the pit and shell and cut into a small dice. Put all this into a small bowl.

Chop the garlic very fine, and chop the parsley coarsely holding back 1 msk or 1 tbls. of the parsley for garnish later. Shred the spring onion finely, add these to the bowl with the diced vegetables.

Add the vinegar, olive oil and sugar, mix well and salt and pepper to taste.

Refrigerate for a minimum of 1/2 hour, an hour is better.

Making salsa yourself is really easy and gives such a good fresh finished product. An excellent salsa only requires that all the ingredients are ripe and fresh. I also think that cucumber is an essential ingredient for its crunch and fresh summery taste.

All the vegetables should be cut into the same size dice, about 1/2 cm or 1/2 inch square.

I don't normally like super hot, sweet and sticky salsas that are available in shops. They are more like soupy chutneys where all the textures and flavors are mushed together. Fresh salsa tastes and feels so much more interesting.

You can make this more southern european by leaving out the avocado and using 1/2 of a red pepper and 1/2 of a yellow pepper, replace the parsley with fresh basil or oregano and replacing the red wine vinegar with balsamic vinegar if you like.

Chop the garlic very fine, there is nothing worse than a mouth full of uncooked garlic. Very finely chopped garlic is better than using a garlic press which tends to change the taste of the finished salsa but it's your choice.

Use the recipe above and replace the parsley with cilantro (corriander).

Make any salsa more hot and spicy with the addition of 1/2 chili pepper very finely chopped, or more if you like.

Dried spices can work in this as well but you won't get that great summer flavor, if you use dried spices such as oregano use half the amount in the recipe and leave to rest at least one hour.

This recipe is great to go with all grilled meats, chicken and almost anything BBQ. I use it to dress up beef, pork or turkey burgers. I serve it with a little natural greek yogurt or creme fresh on the side.

Experiment with these two basic recipes yourself, this is only a basic guide. There are 8 billion people on this planet and probably as many salsa recipes.

It is already a low fat accompaniment to meats and chicken but to make this more low fat use 1/2 olive oil 1/2 corn or veg oil, leave out the pitch of sugar and serve with low fat yogurt or creme fresh.