With a few green jalapeños and one habañero from the pepper plants I pulled before frost, I made up some of “Jessica’s Hot Pepper Sauce.”
I normally do not like the site About.com, but I do enjoy the sauce that I made using this recipe:
Ingredients:
- 1 1/2 cups vinegar
- 6 chile peppers (at least one cayenne, a variety tastes best) minced
- 6 oz can tomato paste
- 1 tablespoon minced garlic
- 1 teaspoon black pepper
- 1 teaspoon lemon juice
- Olive oil
Preparation:
- Saute your peppers and garlic in about a tablespoon of olive oil.
- Stir in the tomato paste and half the vinegar.
- Bring to boil and add the rest.
This turned out a bit thick and the recipe completely forgot to add salt. I actually unbottled this after my first tasting and added at least a teaspoon full of salt to the recipe, if not twice that.
I have been keeping it out at room temperature because it won’t run through the neck of the bottle I chose for it when it’s cold. It’s pretty acidic, so we’ll see how long it lasts. Maybe I ought to just pour it into a jar and refrigerate it.
Don’t let me fool you with those last few negative observations…I really like this hot sauce! I will save the modified salt-added recipe and make this again. I might try to modify it further to remove the oil so I can safely can it in quarter-pint jelly jars and perhaps increase the liquid by a couple tablespoons.
The next-to-the-last thing out of my garden for 2008 were the pepper plants. Only the lettuce remains now.
I had quite a handful of chili peppers that didn’t turn red, so I thought I would try making some spicy vinegar like I have seen out on the tables at some restaurants.
I did no research until after the fact, so there are things I would do differently now. I just washed and dropped all the peppers I had into an old clean soy sauce bottle. Then I threw in about a teaspoon of salt and filled it with hot vinegar.
It seems to have worked out fine, as just an hour or two after filling the bottle the vinegar was already spicy.
According to most sources I checked later, I should have completely filled the bottle with vegetables to avoid the peppers floating in there. I would have done that if I’d had enough peppers, but I guess I could have also used fillers like onions and carrots.
Anyway, it has a great taste already and I can hardly wait to see how it is after a few weeks.
At the Apple Farm
We went to a local apple orchard last weekend and found a great apple peeler for a really decent price. We also found their section of “Number 2″ apples that had a speck or two of black or bruise on them…for half price! We came home with 1/2 bushel each of Gala and Jonathan apples for the grand total of $12.50. Time to make applesauce!
S. concentrates as he turns the crank
The boys helped a little bit. The peeler also runs the apples through a coring blade and rotates them through a spiral slicing blade. The end result, in 20 seconds, is an apple ready to simply cut in half and throw into a cooking pot.
H. peels one too
So, we peeled and canned a bushel of apples over the course of two days…probably 5 to 6 hours work.
After a stock pot was full of sliced, cored, peeled apples, I added a few cups of water (slightly less might have worked too, I had to cook some off) and boiled / steamed them with the lid on until they were mushy.
I smashed them down with our Pampered Chef mashing device tool thingy and then blended them to a chunky consistency with a handheld blender. We still don’t have a food mill, but we wanted it chunky anyway…or so I was told.
At the end, we added a cup or two of sugar to taste, and cinnamon to some batches.
Home canned, homemade applesauce
Somewhere around 25 pints resulted, plus a few pints we ate right away in the kitchen. I processed the jars for 20 minutes in a boiling water bath and every one sealed.
Yardlong Green Beans
I’ve had better tasting green beans than the Yardlong variety we grew. They weren’t bad…just not great. They truly were EXTREMELY prolific for the space they took up. I had to cook them quite a while to get them to the point where I could really enjoy them. Butter and bacon helped too. 
Below are pictures of the AWESOME cake I was given at a going-away lunch on my last day of work yesterday. I worked there for just shy of 9 years.
After several weeks with no posts, I’ll come out of my silence! Thank you for checking in on me! Things are OK!
It was said a few months ago that my absentee boss was finally putting our business up for sale. The writing had been on the wall for a long time after she moved out of state, but the proceedings were actually starting.
I had been watching job listings for a couple years, since the price of gas went over $2.50 or so. My 80-mile-per-day commute cost me under $200 a month in 1999, but the gas bill had been MUCH higher in the past few years. But the job listings never showed up in this area, and I was comfortable, so I stayed on.
Thank God, right around the same time we were “put on notice” a few months ago, job listings started popping up left and right…probably 6 places to try for in my field! I interviewed here and there and finally accepted a position two weeks ago, in town.
Yesterday was my last day at my old job. It also happened to be the day that the boss announced that there was now a closing date for the sale of her business. Trucks will arrive there in about 4 weeks to haul away everything. And that’s pretty much it.
I start a new job tomorrow while those remaining there get a stressful month of packing up the place they have worked for between 9 and 14 years.
The stress of all this is the main reason why I have barely done anything in my garden and why I haven’t posted anything on here for a good long time.
With a few green jalapeños and one habañero from the pepper plants I pulled before frost, I made up some of “Jessica’s Hot Pepper Sauce.”
