I’ve been promising for months to share my mom’s salsa story. Not her recipe…but her story. I can’t share her recipe. But the story is kind of a nice one. :)

My mom began making salsa when I was a little girl, tweaking and playing with ingredients from her garden until she figured out a recipe that was just right. We all loved it. Neighbors loved it. Family members loved it. Friends loved it. There was nothing incredibly fancy about Mom’s salsa. It was slightly sweet. Slightly spicy. Just right.

When my brother and I were in college, she would send her home-canned salsa to the dorm with us. It became a hit with our college friends and it wouldn’t last long. :)  I’m not sure when Mom’s salsa really began to become a “big thing” locally, but I believe it was around the time I was graduating from college and getting married.

People all over the town where she and my dad lived were requesting that she make them some of her salsa. She began receiving orders. A downtown shop began to request her salsa so that they could sell it to their customers. After a while, she was making so many jars of salsa, she could barely keep up. She knew with the volume of salsa she was making, she needed a licensed kitchen to work in. She was swimming in salsa. :)

Around that time, my uncle and aunt in Chicago who had “connections” set up a meeting with a company who could make and market my mom’s salsa for her. Mom and Dad flew to Chicago, toured the commercial kitchen, made necessary negotiations, signed a bunch of papers…and my mom’s salsa officially became  BJ’s Salsa:

(My mom’s name was Bettye Jo…her family and some friends often called her BJ.)

Now my mom didn’t have to break her neck to keep up with the salsa demand! It was being made and shipped out to stores and marketed by others. My mom was so pleased with this success, and well she should be. She’d worked hard for this!

My mom was diagnosed with ALS (Lou Gehrigs Disease) in the fall of 2002. Salsa sales had begun to slow by then anyway, and all of us were so focused on Mom and her health and keeping her comfortable, salsa was really the last thing on our minds.

After she went to be with Jesus in July of 2004, our family was so thankful to have a few jars of her salsa left. We cherished and hoarded them. We were out of sorts and grieving. We weren’t thinking very logically (or at least I wasn’t), which is why it took over a year for us to talk about or realize that it may still be possible for her salsa to be made and sent to us.

Dad checked into it and sure enough. We could get ourselves some BJ’s Salsa.

We still cherish each jar of my mom’s salsa. But we don’t have to hoard it anymore. And every time I open a new jar, I feel like I’m opening something made by my mom. There is a simple statement on each jar:

“Developed in the kitchen of Bettye Jo Hamm”

It helps me not miss her quite so much. Or maybe it makes me miss her even more.

I use her recipe now (which must be kept a secret) to make salsa with ingredients from my own garden. It’s not quite as good as “Grammy’s salsa” was, but we like it okay. ;)

Now, anytime I talk about using salsa in a recipe, you know that I’m not just using any ol’ salsa. I’m opening a treasure each time I open a jar of salsa. One that came right out of “Bettye Jo’s kitchen”.

{Edited to note:  BJ’s Salsa isn’t sold in any stores right now (except for one small shop in my hometown). Thanks for inquiring about it. Maybe we should look into putting it in stores again? Hmm…}