A Favorite Idea for Peppers

It seems as if all of our peppers struggle mightily during the long summer days, wilting and not producing much at all.  As the days grow shorter and the temps fall off a bit, the peppers catch a second wind.  Suddenly, we are awash in peppers.  We're pickling (by lacto-fermentation) quart after quart of banana peppers.  We brought several baskets of banana peppers to give away at church as everyone likes pickling them.  We're dehydrating jalapenos and habaneros and grinding them into pepper.  We're making poppers with jalapenos and hot banana peppers.  We're dicing and freezing Anaheim peppers that Tricia uses to cook with.  In fact, the wife told me, "There's no sense in planting bell peppers anymore.  They haven't been producing well and Anaheims are better."

And then I went and checked on the bell peppers and there was a half dozen of them on the little bell pepper plant.  Well, what do you know?  They must have heard that they were fixing to be stricken from the planting rotation and quickly produced to save their spot.

 I brought them inside and we promptly cleaned them up and cored them.  We had an idea for supper tonight - something we hadn't done in a while: Stuffed Bell Peppers!  Tricia has a quick recipe that she puts together.  It's basically dirty rice, with a little tomato sauce added and then topped off with cheese, put in a baking pan and toss in the oven for a spell.  Some people like them topped with tomato paste/sauce, but we like cheese on top.  They turned out so good, we brought a couple to our son, Russ, who lives in a town about 10 miles away.  Russ loves peppers.  He said they are his favorite vegetable in the garden.

As is often the case, we had too much stuffing and not enough bell peppers.  So we did what anybody would do.  We made do with what we had on hand.  We have an abundance of beautiful Anaheim peppers on hand.  Anaheims will not stand up, so I just sliced them in half, making something sort of like a boat.  We spooned the stuffing into the Anaheim boats.  While bell peppers are sweet, Anaheims have a little heat, but not much.  Mild, I would call them.

The last few nights, the temperatures have dipped into the mid-30's.  The peppers will continue to produce until the freeze gets 'em.  For right now, we're still picking and finding delicious things to do with them.

Patricia Picked a Peck of Peppers

When I got in from work I didn't see Tricia and didn't know where she was until I went out and began filling the cow and goat water troughs with water.  Then I saw her.  She was in the garden with her baskets.  She came inside after a little bit with a nice-sized harvest of various peppers.  From October until December or the first freeze is our best time for pepper production.  Although we didn't weigh them, it's a pretty good haul.  We've already picked and eaten and pickled and dehydrated a bunch and there are a bunch more on the way.  This doesn't count the jalapenos.

This basket are our Hot Banana Peppers.  I have these planted in a row far from the others as I didn't want them crossing with the mild banana peppers.  These boogers will surprise you.  You expect them to be a regular banana pepper and bite into it and it's not!

These are the regular banana peppers.  They are mild and crunchy.  We have pickled (lacto-fermented) quarts and quarts of these this year with many more to go.  We like eating them as a side dish at lunch.

Here are the Anaheim Peppers.  We like cooking with these and often use them instead of bell peppers.  They have a little bite to them - not as hot as a jalapeno, but more spice than a sweet bell pepper.  They add some good flavor to the pot.

And here is a mystery pepper.  I think it is some sort of habenero cross.  It sends you scrambling for milk to put out the fire in your mouth!  We've resorted to dehydrating these and then grinding into a fine powder for making a homemade creole seasoning blend.  It's very good.  You just have to be careful that you don't overdo it.

The jalapenos should be producing more and more now.  We eat those as fast as we pull them.  The shishito peppers, a new variety we planted this year, were a big hit, and we enjoyed blistering them and eating with some lime juice and kosher salt with grated cheese on top.  Sadly, all three of the plants all died at the same time.  We'll definitely plant more of those this spring.

What are your favorite peppers?

Jalapeno Hot Sauce (Part II)

Way back on November 30th, we showed how Benjamin and I made Jalapeno Hot Sauce.  Well, it turned out so good, that it is gone!  In a little over a month we devoured a quart of the stuff.  Rather than being a hot sauce like Tabasco, Crystal, or Louisiana Hot Sauce, it was more like chow-chow.  It was good, but not really a liquid.  To put it on eggs or rice and beans or anything else for that matter, you had to use a spoon.  That's not really a problem, but we wanted to make a hot sauce that flowed.

We have so many peppers!  Jalapenos, Anaheims, bell peppers, criolla sellas.  We're going to make jalapeno hot sauce with these and then dry the rest of them and make ground jalapeno pepper for seasoning. 

For this recipe, we'll use the following:

• 20 jalapenos
• 1/2 cup onion
• 3 garlic cloves
• salt
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 2 cups water
• 1 cup white vinegar

I sliced up the jalapenos, minced the garlic and chopped the onions.

I splashed the olive oil in the bottom of the Dutch oven and sautéed the peppers, onion, and garlic for about five minutes on high heat.  I added salt.

The aroma of the mixture permeated the kitchen.  It cleared out my sinuses!

Then I added the two cups of water and let it cook for about 15 minutes.

All the liquid was boiled off, leaving the jalapeno/onion/garlic mixture.  I pulled off the burner and allowed it to come to room temperature.

This was put into the food processor and as I pureed it, I poured the 1 cup of white vinegar into the processor.

Once liquified, I used a funnel to pour the jalapeno pepper sauce into 2 hot sauce bottles that we had saved.

Tonight, Tricia made a Beef Vegetable soup.  It was fresh.  Everything came from right here on our little farm.  It was raining outside and chilly, so the hot soup hit the spot.  I was able to test our new pepper sauce.  I unscrewed the cap and poured several squirts of hot sauce in the soup.  It flowed!  The flavor was GOOD!  Spicy, with a kick.  This is a keeper!

A Little Hot Stuff

We grow a lot of peppers.  All different types.  Jalapenos, Criolla Sellas, Anaheims, Sweet Bells.  We start them from seeds in early January.  Once it cools off in the fall before it freezes, the peppers have a last burst of productivity.  We harvest and freeze lots of them.  We dry them and make chili powder.  One thing we did this year was dried jalapenos and then ground it up to make Jalapeno Pepper powder.  It's good for adding to anything like you would black pepper.  This just has an added punch to it.

We also like hot sauce.  We like Crystal Hot Sauce and Tabasco Sauce.  Benjamin and I decided to make our own Jalapeno Hot Sauce this year.  We gathered all of our ingredients:  Jalapeno peppers (1 pound freshly picked), 3/4 cup white vinegar, 1/3 cup water, 1 cup onions, 1 teaspoon cumin, 1 teaspoon oregano, 1 teaspoon salt, 2 garlic cloves, and black pepper.

We picked the freshest jalapenos off the plants in the garden and washed them in water.

Then I de-stemmed the jalapenos.  I left the seeds and everything with the peppers.  Tricia said she could really smell them when I started cutting them.  I made a note to NOT put my fingers anywhere near my eyes.  I learned that lesson before.

I sautéed the onion and garlic in some oil in a dutch oven.  Once translucent I added the oregano, salt and cumin and allowed to cook for a minute.  Then I added the peppers, vinegar and water and brought to a simmer.

I poured all that into a food processor and added some sprigs of fresh cilantro on top.  Then I pulsed it until smooth.

We poured it all into a quart jar.  You ought to smell it.  Powerful stuff!

It'll keep in the fridge for about a month.

We just spoon out a dollop of it on top of our food.  This morning I mixed a tablespoon of it into my bowl of grits for breakfast.  It added a nice little kick!  But that's just one idea.  Really, we'll put it on anything except maybe dessert.

The Boss Sauce

My sons and I eat hot sauce on everything.  For beans and rice or peas and rice, I like a hot sauce like Tabasco that has a high vinegar content.  For everything else, I prefer Crystal hot sauce or Louisiana hot sauce.  We grow a lot of peppers of varying heat levels.  Rather than buy it, why not make it?  That is a very good question.

We'll make a sauce today.  One year I made a hot sauce using tabasco peppers.  Today we'll make one that has three different types of pepper.  The first being Criolla Sella.

The criolla sella pepper is a mild pepper with a smoky taste.  It originates from Bolivia.  I took a few PTO days off of work and backpacked down to Bolivia, forded 17 streams on the back of a burro, and traded with the local Bolivian villagers for a few of the prized seeds and was able to grow these.

No, that's not true at all.  It makes a better story than, "I ordered these heirloom seeds off of the Internet" and have saved the seeds every year.  The other two peppers in our hot sauce will be Anaheim peppers and jalapeno peppers.  Jalapenos are semi-hot, Anaheims are mild, and Criolla Sellas are mild and smoky.  I figured that would make an interesting flavor profile.  In looking at the colors, though.  I'm not sure this is going to make a pretty color sauce when done.

I gathered 1 and 1/2 pounds of peppers and used 6 cloves of garlic and packed them in two quart jars.

I made a brine using 4 cups water with 4 teaspoons salt and heated in a saucepan until the salt was dissolved.  When it had cooled, I poured into the jars until all the peppers were covered.  Tricia had asked for some fermentation weights for Mother's Day.  They are essentially glass disks that weigh down whatever you are fermenting so it stays beneath the level of the brine.  We gave them a test drive with this project.

Then we covered with a dishrag and put in the pantry for 5 days.

When the five days was up, I poured the pepper/brine concoction through a sieve and reserved 1 cup of the brine.  I put the peppers in a food processor, adding the cup of brine, 1/3 cup apple cider vinegar, 1 tablespoon honey, and 1/2 teaspoon xanthan gum.  Then I mixed and chopped until it was semi-smooth.

I always save some bottles just for projects like this, so we poured the sauce into the bottles with a funnel.  See what I mean about the color?

It is a little strange.

But as far as the taste, it even got a passing grade from Tricia, and she's not a hot sauce aficionado like the rest of us.  She likes it!  It has a sweet-hot, smoky flavor.  One of the four bottles is already gone and it's only been bottled for about 5 days.  I'll have to make another batch before long.  I think I'll add some additional heat to the next batch, but this recipe is a keeper. 

Some Like It Hot

Peppers are a staple in our garden year by year.  We grow sweet peppers like Emerald Bell, Lilac Bell, Horizon Bell, Chocolate Bell, and Banana peppers.  We also have some mild peppers like Anaheim peppers and criolla sellas and then some hot peppers like jalapenos.  We cook with them, make pepper jelly and eat them raw.  We make a lot of Jalapeno Poppers.

The peppers grow and produce throughout the year, but they really produce in abundance during the fall.  Last year we cut a bunch of them up and put them in the dehydrator.  We have a full one gallon ziploc bag of dehydrated jalapeno peppers.  Whenever we cook, Tricia will grab a tablespoon full and put in the pot.

In anticipation of another bumper crop about to come in, we decided to do something with the dehydrated peppers from last year.  We got them out and poured them into the food processor.

After processing for a while, what's left is ground jalapeno pepper.  As soon as we took the cover off of the processer, we both began to sneeze.  The hot pepper was in the air!  Even though we couldn't see it, our sneezes evidenced that fact.

We poured the ground jalapeno pepper into a spice container.

Just yesterday, we had Chicken Fricassee for lunch.  Ground jalapeno pepper was sprinkled on top and it added a whole additional layer of flavor.  Delicious!