Canning pickled peppers

-->

(I did this canning and wrote this post prior to my most recent trip- a week in Southern Oregon- I'm slow this week and will have photos and an account of that sometime soon. But my mind is very much on preserving and settling in for fall right now, so this post very much fits with my current mood!)

My repertoire of canned things is fairly limited at this point, my staples being peaches, dilly beans, jam, and pickled peppers. Having spicy pickled peppers from my garden on hand through the winter is very fulfilling; they make a great addition to tacos, chili, and cornbread (I lay them on top of the cornbread in the pan so they bake into the top crust). After canning, hot peppers like jalapeños lose some of their fire. I can eat these straight from the jar, they are nice and spicy but not painfully so!

I don’t know what the origin of this recipe is. I copied it over from the one in my parents’ recipe box, which didn’t have a source on it; my recipe card only says “from Dad.” However, it’s a nice simple recipe. Compared to canning fruit or something that needs lots of processing, this hardly feels like work.

Disclaimer: I am not a canning expert, and anyone new to canning should do some extra reading about the safety of canned food and the specific canning methods needed for different types of foods. While I have never had any problem with this recipe, I cannot guarantee that the product will be 100% safe for eating and take no responsibility for the results of anyone else’s use of this recipe.

Makes 2 pints (the batch I photographed was only 1 ½ pints)

2 pints hot peppers (Jalapeños or Serranos work great; I threw in some green Aci Sivris too)

1/3 cup salt, plus a teaspoon more

1 quart water

Pickling Liquid

½ clove garlic, diced

½ Tbsp horseradish

2 ½ cups vinegar

½ cup water

1/16 cup sugar

Canning Equipment

Canning kettle

Saucepan

Canning rack

Jar tongs

Canning funnel

Measuring cup/ladle

Clean dry cloth or dishrag

Four half-pint jars

Four canning lids and rings

Slice the peppers into coins and place in a medium-sized mixing bowl. Dissolve the salt in one quart of water, and pour over the peppers. Cover and let sit 12-16 hours in a cool place. 

After the peppers have sat for 12-16 hours, fill your canning kettle with enough water for the boiling water bath (the water should cover up the jars completely), and get it heating up. 

Combine the ingredients for the pickling liquid in a saucepan. Simmer for 15 minutes (it's going to smell really acidic, so open a window or turn on a fan :). Drain the peppers and rinse thoroughly. While the pickling liquid is simmering, sterilize the jars and lids (do this in the canning kettle once the water bath has reached boiling).

Pack the jars with peppers, and pour the boiling hot pickling liquid over the peppers, leaving ¼ inch of headspace. 

Wipe the rims of the jars with a dry cloth. Place the lids and rings on the jars (tighten the rings all the way, then loosen one quarter turn). Process half-pints (or pints) for 10 minutes in the boiling water bath. 

Remove the jars from the bath with the jar tongs, and tighten the rings down all the way (use a dish towel to protect your hands from the hot jars). Let the jars cool, then remove the rings and check that all lids are sealed. I use the BPA-free Tattler lids and seals. For these, you just have to give the lids a tug and make sure they won’t come off. If you use standard metal canning lids, press the center of the lids. If the lid presses down and makes a noise, it hasn’t sealed properly (with these lids, you’ll often hear a “pop” sound while the jars are cooling, as the jars seal). These jars should be secured with a ring again and stored in the fridge and used first. Jars that have sealed properly can be stored in the cupboard until they are opened, and after that they will need to be closed with a canning ring and stored in the fridge. 

From the Week

Wow, it's been a busy week! Matt started his job at precisely the moment that school kicked into high gear for me, resulting in a routine in which there are only two days per week when we are both home before dark. This week was particularly insane, with me in class on Friday night and all day yesterday, hence the lengthy radio silence.

I forgot to mention that I did make jalapeno jelly a few weeks ago. I used this recipe, and while it came out positively delightful, I would definitely reduce the sugar next time, probably by at least one cup.

I highly recommend it. It's particularly good with cheese and crackers, and on sandwiches that involve meat.

I also cut up our apple harvest, and put away several gallons of frozen apple pie filling.

Today was my one day at home for the week, and while I have a huge pile of homework lurking upstairs, I spent most of today outside. Our beautiful weather is continuing, although the nights are getting colder now.  Rain is in the forecast for next weekend; if we get it, it will be the first proper rain in three months.

We had baked colcannon for dinner one night this week. Definitely one to add to our menu plan on a more regular basis.

Matt and Elliot butchered all but two of the 8-week-old rabbits yesterday, and today I butchered my first rabbit (or any animal, ever, for that matter). WARNING: MODERATELY GORY PHOTOS OF BUTCHERING AHEAD. I know there are people who think it's insane to kill your own meat, let alone post photos of it, but in our society where the process behind meat and meat products is completely hidden from consumers, I think what we need is more visibility of the process. Strangely, it's completely acceptable to do your own butchering when it comes to hunting, but people seem to think it's weird and gross to butcher animals you raise yourself, and the smaller the animal, the more people get freaked out. It's certainly not something to be taken lightly, and we make sure to thank the rabbits and give them a last minute of cuddling and relaxation before they go, and it is distinctly difficult to watch the life go out of an animal's eyes. But if you eat meat than I think you need to be willing to see how the animal becomes meat, even if you don't actively participate. If you can't stomach the process, you probably shouldn't stomach the product. That said:

Matt did slaughtered and butchered the first one, so I could see how it was done.

I was a little nervous about getting the killing part right- it's a fairly tricky business and unfortunately it's relatively easy to break a rabbit's neck without killing it (the actual slaughtering is much easier on larger animals). So I asked Matt to kill mine for me, and after I've seen a couple more I will do it myself.

Here I had cut the head off, it was draining the blood and ready for skinning. 

Reflecting on it, the hardest part for me, apart from watching the killing, was the fact that the carcass was so warm the whole time I was processing it. I've cut up chickens and cut the skin from the meat, but the meat is always so cold that you don't necessarily get the sense that it was once alive, and of course there is no blood. It was also fascinating to see the insides and where the organs are and how they all fit together. I'm really glad I know how to do it now, and in a strange but satisfying way I look forward to being able to do the killing part too. Another skill in my self-sufficiency arsenal.

After putting the rabbits in the freezer and cleaning up, I worked on putting the veggie plots around the front yard to bed for the winter. I pulled out all the remaining tomato plants, and tilled it up and planted it in cover crops, along with some spinach and kale.

 I unhooked the drip hose and packed it up for the winter, and left the strip in the foreground (with the turning fork in it) alone- that is where we'll plant garlic later in the fall.

Now Matt is working on cleaning the house, and it's time for me to get a pot of chili and some cornbread going for dinner. Once that's done, I'll contemplate doing some schoolwork. It's just so good to be home today.

Planting and Preserving the Fall Garden

Our warm-- even hot-- weather kept up for a really long time, but this week we went from 90 degrees and warm nights straight to chilly nights and cool days. Sigh. I guess fall truly is upon us. I'm glad it's held off as long as it did, even if it is my favorite season. I'm just not quite ready to let the heat go. This morning it is warm, but the ground is wet- some of the first precipitation we've had in two months.

We've been making an effort to get the fall crops and cover crops planted earlier this year than we managed last year. I think last fall the cover crops went into the ground in October, which meant that they barely grew at all. This time hopefully we've got them in in time to get established and growing before the really cold weather hits. I had a nice afternoon yesterday, pottering around the garden, harvesting, planting, pulling up spent plants, and generally tidying things up. Matt was home and feeling under the weather, but he got up for an hour or so to give the chicken coop a good clean and do some much needed maintenance on the henhouse and the rabbit cages. It was nice to be working together, but separately, to make our little homestead more tidy and productive.

All of our cucumbers got powdery mildew this year, and I hardly got a Straight Eight off this vine that wasn't too bitter to eat. The scarlet runner beans here did wonderfully though. This bed still contains two rows of fall carrots, and most of our basil. This bed has been constantly growing things since we moved in over a year ago, so this winter it's going to get a rest. We'll just mulch it with straw and rabbit poo, and give it several months to get some new nutrients built up. 

This bed has chard and green onions, plus one tomato plant. It is also now growing fall greens- collards and kale. Yesterday I planted all of the remaining space in red clover, which is a good nitrogen-fixing cover crop and will grow low under and between the other crops. 

The old garlic bed is doing a great job with the carrots and turnips so far, and yesterday I planted more turnips into the empty spaces, for a later crop. According to the seed packet, in our zone we can plant turnips periodically throughout the winter, so I think we'll give that a shot and try and have a rotation of them throughout the cold months. 

The "empty" space in this bed has been seeded with bok choy and a cover crop mix (clover, field peas, and vetch), and the back under the trellis is more kale and spinach. I've been doing battle with the aphids on the cabbages and broccolis. I lost one full head of broccoli by the time I noticed the infestation, but now I've been essentially power washing the plants with the hose every day, and I seem to be winning the battle. 

 I picked the remaining apples yesterday, and now we have probably at minimum thirty pounds of them. I had thought they were good eaten fresh, until Dad brought some of his early apples along last weekend. I had forgotten just how delicious they can be! Oh well, I know that ours make excellent pies, and that is going to be one of my projects for today: mixing up bags of apple pie filling to freeze.

 We're still only getting ripe Asian pears here and there. I have a good guage for how to tell if an apple is ready to pick, but have no experience with these. Online sources say when they come easily off the tree, and so far only a few have done so, but the skins on them still seem really thick and tough. Anyone have any other tips?

Yes, it's definitely looking autumn-y.

We haven't eaten a single rhubarb dessert all summer, but this plant has been flourishing. Maybe we'll have a crumble sometime this weekend, just to do it justice. 

Proof of impending fall, courtesy of the lilac bush by the mailbox. 

But this is Portland, so of course the roses are still blooming :) 

And the baskets of goodness are still coming in. I dug one of our parsnips, and we had it for dinner all sliced and fried up in butter. Yum! Lots of scarlet runner beans are drying out upstairs now, a big bag of hot peppers and another one of beans await processing in the fridge, and our one solitary leek has been harvested. I think we'll have potato-leek soup tonight. A good meal on a gray day. 

I'm home alone today, my last free Friday before I go back to school next week. I slept in, and am having coffee and toast as I write this. I am planning to enjoy one last day or two of housecleaning, canning, and listening to archived episodes of "This American Life," before returning to the world of graduate school. We already have as many pickled hot peppers as we'll eat this year, so I'm going to try making hot pepper jelly. Then there are the apples to deal with, my desk to clean out, and hopefully I can get a batch or two of dry beans cooked up and into the freezer. Our routines are about to change dramatically- Matt starts a new, full-time, permanent job (!!!!) on October 1st, and I'll be gone three evenings a week at class, so having lots of  food prepped and in the freezer will serve us well.

Working Through the Abundance

Abundance with a capital A! I know my blog is heavy with tomatoes and preserving these days, but the activities I write about here reflect the seasons, and this is what we're doing this time of year. In the winter, it is baking and knitting and sewing (and homework, like as not), but now, at the end of summer, we are drowning in tomatoes and filling up the freezer and stocking the shelves for winter, so that is what happens here on the blog. It's glorious, all this red in our kitchen:

On Monday night Matt cooked up a huge batch of stovetop passata for freezing. He likes the taste of that better than the oven-roasted version, so we do some of both, and label them separately. Man, oh man, is it good. These big pink Oxhearts are so great for sauce, the perfect texture and deep flavor.

We were laughing last night, how we haven't eaten at this table in months. This is our winter breakfast spot, but in the summer there are so many baskets and bowls of good things and we just don't quite have the counter space to accommodate it all, so it goes here.

Matt's been working full days these last couple of weeks, helping with my cousin's house renovation, so I'm mainly on garden and kitchen duty since I only work part-time and have 3-day weekends. We'll swap back over to Matt having most of the cooking and cleaning duties when I start school in three weeks and take on a bigger courseload than I've attempted yet...can't I just please have one more month of vacation? :) We'll have even more juggling to do if/when Matt lands a regular full-time job. It will be a major blessing, but also will change our routines a lot.

We had a delicious summer meal last night, Matt cooked pork chops with mushrooms and sweet pepper, and I made steamed green beans with a soy-sesame dressing, and bioled potatoes dressed with lemon and chives.

It felt so good to cook a full meal together. We've been so busy/exhausted that we haven't managed this much recently.

Even with Matt's huge batch of sauce, there were lots of leftover tomatoes. So this afternoon I made a big salsa, and put a pan of plain tomatoes and olive oil in the oven to cook up. I didn't add any herbs or garlic this time, so we'll have some plain stewed tomatoes for adding to soups and chili. I've also got half a dozen eggs hard boiling, to take care of some of that particular abundance.

I also just took a punnet of cherry tomatoes over to the neighbors; their 3-year-old daughter loves them, so that's a handy way to get rid of extras! I'm heading out of town again this weekend, so hopefully all of this work will lighten the load for Matt while I'm away.

Last on the list is the apples! We're both excited to be picking apples from our trees! We somehow missed the prime harvest last year, and right now they are mostly just ripe! The trees did get apple scab, but the majority of the apples came through just fine, not the prettiest in the world but damn tasty.

I was planning to make burritos for dinner tonight, but I think we'll go more in the smorgasbord direction. We have such a variety of things that are calling out to be eating. So I think we'll have chips and salsa and the leftover pinto beans that are in the fridge, with sliced apples and some blue cheese. I'm going to try one other thing, a recipe that our roommate passed on to me: fresh sliced tomato dressed in browned butter with salt. It sounds amazing, and I have a massive Cherokee Purple that demands to be eaten fresh- they're far too good to cook.

Now, when will find time to put in the fall crops? This summer has been so insanely jam-packed, luckily all with fun things, but I'm starting to look forward to school, if only because it means I have to stay in town for more than a week at a time!

How are things in your garden?

Chilli Pepper Ristras

I've been really pleased with the beauty and abundance of the Aci Sivri chillis we grew this year. The plants are just loaded with them. They have all begun turning bright red in the last few weeks, and this week I harvested all of the red ones (there are many more still to ripen on the plants) and strung a couple of ristras. These are supposedly a charm to bring good luck, if you hang them in your house, and are also simply pretty.

Using a doubled thread, I sewed one string of the peppers through the stems, then made a loop at the top for hanging them by. The other string I did by threading them straight through the middle of the peppers, for a different look. 

The ristras need to hang somewhere warm and dry, with good air circulation, in order to dry completely without molding. At our house, the best place is under the front overhand, where we cured the garlic. Our kitchen is often too humid to allow things to dry properly.

They make a nice decoration, indoors or out! I'll be able to make plenty more as the rest of the peppers get red, and we'll give them as gifts and keep one or two. The dried peppers should be perfect for flavoring stews and chili this winter, and for making our own pepper flakes and chilli salt.

Here and There

It's been a week full of bunnies, tomatoes, friends, and all kinds of other things. Some bad, some good. Mostly good. 

We tried this Five Minute Bread and it's outstanding. I'm sold. 

Babies! They're two weeks old now. Sixteen plump little bunnies out of the original 17 (two litters born on the same day. We need to learn to stagger the breedings so we don't get so inundated).  We're all getting better at this, mamas and human caretakers both. Fewer casualties every time.

This was a few days ago- they're already so much bigger. Princess's brood were out of their nest box for a few minutes here; we had to pull it out to remove a sibling that had died during our heat wave.  You can see the naked spots where Princess pulled out her fur to line the nest before they were born.

Safely back in a new clean nest.

We're still drowning in cherry tomatoes, and I've been eating a couple peaches a day; always my favorite type of fruit. There is a fruit stand a couple blocks away that has some really incredible ones. 

We bought a whole box and canned 13 quarts on Sunday. It was the first time Matt had canned anything, I'm glad I got to teach him. I had a couple metal canning lids that were still fresh. The rest are the BPA-free Tattler lids and rings, and we also used two of the Weck jars that Matt gave me for Christmas (on the right). 

We're heading out of town for the weekend, so in an effort to use up all the ripe tomatoes before we leave, I whipped up a batch of pasta sauce for freezing.

Our friends Provo and Jeremy brought us a big crookneck squash yesterday so I added a bunch of that too. I piled everything into a pan, covered it in herbs, garlic, and olive oil, and baked for an hour at 400F. 

Tomato skins pulled off, everything pureed in the food processor, and now four meals' worth of sauce put away in the freezer. That's a nice feeling.

We're off to the woods of the Olympic Peninsula for the weekend, to see some good friends get hitched. See you next week!