Pimento Cheese!

Roasted homegrown pimentos

After a long, long period of neglect of my beloved Milkweed Diaries, I'm breaking radio silence with a short little ode to pimento cheese.  Oh pimento cheese, I love you!

A classic staple of the American South, this delicious and creamy treat is traditionally made with Duke's mayonnaise and canned pimentos. My slightly pretentious, healthy, homegrown version is made with raw goat cheese and fresh roasted peppers.  As I spooned this experimental concoction straight into my mouth fresh from the food processor, I announced to Christopher: "I believe this is the best thing I have ever made."  Even in the clear light of day a week later, I'm pretty sure it's true.  

Here's how to make it:

• Roast the pimentos. I did this at 450 degrees using the broiler setting of my toaster oven.  I drizzled  them with a scant bit of olive oil and broiled them until they had begun to pucker and develop black spots on one side and then flipped them and broiled on the other side.

  

  Roasting the pimentos

• Let the pimentos rest in a paper bag.  This will make them easier to peel.
• Peel the pimentos. This is the tedious and slightly time-consuming part. Remember, it's worth it.  At this point you can store the pimentos in a jar for a day or so if you need to sit the project down til you have time to complete it.

Mixing in the food processor

• Mix the pimentos with fresh raw goat cheese. I used a basic soft goat cheese I had made the night before from our goats' milk using Ricki  Carroll's recipe - a raw, cultured goat cheese made with mesophillic culture.  Any good mild, cultured goat cheese will do - the slight cultured tang adds a really nice zest.  I did the mixing by dumping the pimentos in the bottom of my food processor and gradually adding cheese until the consistency, color, and mix looked right. 
• Enjoy immediately!  This cheese stores well in the fridge and also freezes well, but I find it tastes best at room temperature.

The final product: Pimento Cheese!

One important tip: use good pimentos - as fresh as possible.  I was inspired to make this by the abundance of pimentos rolling in from our garden this year.  I used about 25 homegrown peppers - the beautiful, plump, and prolific Ashe County Pimento from the High Country of Western NC via Southern Exposure Seed Exchange.

Ashe County Pimentos

I also threw in some Doe Hill Golden Bells which are supposedly a bell pepper, but to me look like a small, golden pimento. This seed was also from Southern Exposure, and has been a great addition to our pepper production bed this year. The plants have produced abundantly, and the flavor is wonderful.  According to Southern Exposure, this little gem is a pre-1900 family heirloom from the Doe Hill area in Highland County, Virginia.

Doe Hill Golden Bells

This cheese is so delightful spread on toast, noshed upon with crackers, as a garnish on tomato salads, and eaten straight up with a spoon. I froze a ton of it and am envisioning pimento deviled eggs, pimento grilled cheese and tomato sandwiches, and all manner of pimento goodness through the months to come. Yum!

Pickled Peppers Two Ways

Even with hoophouse protection, pepper season is over. It was a great year for peppers in our garden, probably the best pepper season in the past five years, but all good things must come to an end. We had our first killing frost last night, and the temperatures dropped low enough to blitz the last of the peppers and tomatoes that had been barely hanging on in our unheated high tunnel.

So it was time to pick the rest of the fruits, lay the unripe ones out to finish ripening on the kitchen table in the sun, and preserve the rest. I usually fall back on my tried-and-true Sweet Pepper Hash recipe for preserving peppers, but I had already put away such a tremendous stockpile of Sweet Pepper Hash this year that it was time to diversify.

I tried out two new pickled peppers recipes, both of which look very promising. Both recipes are based on ones I found in "Stocking Up," a classic Rodale publication by Carol Hupping Stoner of which I have a treasured 1977 edition. (The entire book is amazingly available online here: Stocking Up: How to Preserve the Foods You Grow Naturally, Carol Hupping Stoner, Rodale Press, 1977.)

Here are the recipes:

Pepper Pickling Method #1:

Pickled Whole Peppers

• 4 quarts whole, ripe long peppers (these can be hot peppers like Hungarian or Banana, or sweet frying peppers - I used Jimmy Nardellos)
• 1 1/2 cups salt
• 4 quarts plus 2 cups water
• 2 Tbs prepared horseradish
• 4 cloves garlic
• 10 cups apple cider vinegar
• 1/4 cup honey

Jimmy Nardellos after soaking in salt water for 18 hours, ready for packing into jars.

1. Cut two small slits along the long sides of each pepper
2. Dissolve salt in 4 quarts of water. Pour the salt water over the peppers and let stand for 12 to 18 hours in a cool place, covered.
3. Drain, rinse, and drain again thoroughly.
4. Combine 2 cups water and all remaining ingredients except the honey and bring to a simmer. Add honey.
5. Pack peppers into hot, sterilized jars, leaving 1/4 inch headspace. Pour boiling pickling liquid over peppers, ensuring that the 1/4 inch headspace remains. Adjust sterilized lids and process in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes.

Whole pickled peppers after processing

Pepper Pickling Method #2:

Pickled Sweet Pepper Strips

Wash, stem, and core peppers, and slice lengthwise into strips. Steam blanch the strips for 2 minutes, then plunge them into ice water to cool. Drain.

Pack the cooled strips into hot, sterilized pint or half-pint jars. Cover them with a boiling syrup made from 1/2 part honey to 2 parts apple cider vinegar. Leave 1/4 inch headspace. Cap with sterilized lids and process in boiling water bath for 10 minutes.

Red bell pepper strips ready for steam blanching, canning pot boiling on the woodstove

The finished product

The second recipe is much quicker, easier, and less involved than the first, so if you're looking for a speedy way to deal with a pepper onslaught, I recommend pickling them in strips. It turns out looking really lovely, too, especially when you mix red, orange, and yellow peppers. The pickled whole peppers didn't turn out looking as glamorous as I thought they would, I think because the horseradish makes for a little cloudiness. I'm sure the horseradish could be left out for a clear, pickling liquid that better shows off the pretty peppers.

We grew about 20 varieties of heirloom and open-pollinated sweet peppers this year, plus a few seasoning peppers and hot peppers mixed in. My long-time favorite sweet peppers are Jimmy Nardello, Corno di Toro, and Kevin's Early Orange, and they did not disappoint. But Chocolate Bell and Quadratto di Asti Rosso were standouts this year too, and we will grow them again.

Peppers are a great lesson in patience in the garden, starting out from seeds indoors as early as February and only really coming into their prime in September or even early October. The big, ripe bells always feel like treasures to me after all the months of waiting.

Having enough peppers to preserve for the winter feels like such abundance. Store-bought out of season peppers are such a luxury item, pricey both in terms of cost to the customer and cost to the planet. To have a few jars of peppers stashed away on the shelf feels like real wealth--what better riches than beautiful, bright, sweet peppers on a dark winter day!

Monster Mash*

Earlier this week, my dear friend Pooma brought me a basket of gorgeous hot peppers -- a beautiful mix of several varieties of habañeros and jalapeños.

Above: some of the aforementioned habañeros plus the last Italian sweet frying pepper from my garden.

Locally-grown peppers are a rare commodity at the end of the dripping-wet summer we had in these parts, and an especially precious treasure now after the first frosts have hit.

I have for some time had a hankering to make homemade hot sauce, and these peppers presented the perfect opportunity.

When I started searching for recipes for hot sauce, I was delighted to discover that traditional sauces involve fermentation, of which (regular readers know) I am enamored. Fermentation is an old-timey way to preserve food, a creative craft that has been practiced in cultures throughout the world for thousands of years. I love fermentation, and have tried fermenting just about every vegetable you can imagine, and lots of other things too. I've added hot peppers to various ferments over the years, sometimes with extremely intense, mouth-scorching results, but I've never tried fermenting them alone.

Peppers and salt: all you need for a killer mash

It turns out that the most flavorful hot sauces are made from an aged pepper mash, which is just salted peppers fermented for a period of time from a few weeks to three or more YEARS. Then the mash can be used in small quantities for flavoring, or combined with vinegar to make hot sauce. Fermenting hot peppers seems like a good way to spread hot peppery joy throughout the year as well as a step on the path to superlative hot sauce, so I decided to give it a whirl.

It was surprisingly hard to find a recipe online that takes the hot-sauce maker all the way through the process from fresh peppers to fermented mash to the final sauce product. I did find a couple of posts from experienced mash makers here and here and some interesting variations on the basic mash (for instance, here's someone who uses kefir starter culture to innoculate his pepper mash with good results).

Since I have a good understanding of brine-pickling in general, and since making pepper mash seems to be a fairly straightforward brining process. Brine pickling is an ancient, low-tech preservation technique that uses no electricity and very minimal equipment and ingredients. You can read more about brining in earlier posts here and here and also at Sandor Katz's most excellent website, wildfermentation.com. Grist also has a good summary article on brining, including pepper mash making.

Mash-making in progress

In any case, here is the recipe I culled from reading lots of summaries of the process. My mash is atypical because it is adds garlic to the ferment. We have lots of extra garlic from the garden right now, since we're planting our garlic for next year now and there are lots of leftover small cloves, and adding garlic is almost never a bad thing in my opinion.

Garlickey Hot Pepper Mash

Ingredients:

For the mash:

• 2 cups mixed hot peppers (I used green jalapeños; red, yellow, and chocolate habañeros; and one sweet red frying pepper)
• 1/2 cup peeled whole garlic cloves
• 1 Tbs fine- to medium- ground high-quality salt
• 1 Tbs coarse-ground high-quality salt

For the sauce (6 weeks to 6 months later)

• Raw apple cider vinegar to cut the mash to taste

Directions:

1. De-stem and de-seed the peppers. Be careful: this is serious business, because the seeds of hot peppers are really hot! You might want to wear gloves, and if you don't, scrub the heck out of your hands (I use dish soap, rubbing alcohol, and aloe vera to get the pepper sting out-I really should wear gloves) and do not touch your lips, nose, or any other sensitive parts after touching the insides of hot peppers.
2. Throw the peppers and garlic in a food processor or chop by hand. I chopped mine, because I was making a small batch. Some people ferment the peppers whole, but I decided to ferment them without the seeds because I am not one of those people who seeks out crazy over-the-top hotness in my hot sauce.
3. Mix in the regular-grind salt and stir or shake (easy to shake if you do it in a jar).
4. Gently pour in filtered, room temperature water to cover. Make sure that all of the peppers and garlic are completely submerged in the brine.
5. Cover with the coarse-grind salt.
6. Wait and watch!
7. Harvest the mash and make sauce by cutting with vinegar -- I haven't done this step yet, but will post when I do!

The mash in brine on day two.

*I must have heard the song Monster Mash hundreds of times throughout my childhood, always at this time of year, on record players of my elementary school classrooms, so I hope you'll forgive the gratuitious seasonal shoutout, dear reader.

How to Eat Local in the Wintertime

Eating local food is easy in August...but how about in the middle of winter?  

For the seed swap and dinner party that we hosted here last weekend, I challenged myself to cook a meal with as many local ingredients as possible to serve to our dozen or so guests.  Coming up with this much local food in January with nary a farmers market in sight and the garden long-since frozen initially seemed a difficult task.  

It turned out to be easier than I thought, thanks to drying, canning, freezing, fermentation, and some long-storing root vegetables.  

We had a delicious, spicy-sweet wintery feast.  Here's the menu for the almost-100%-local meal that we shared:

• Crostini with dueling pestos
  
• Black bean mole topped with spicy salsa and sweet pepper hash
  
• Creamy mashed sweet potatoes and potatoes with roasted garlic, fresh raw buttermilk, and homemade butter
  
• Slow-cooked collards
  
• Brine-pickled okra
• Warm apple & pear compote served over homemade raw milk ice cream
  
• Blackberry and quince meads & crabapple scrumpy
  

I served two pestos, both made from greens from our garden back in the summer, frozen, and thawed for this meal. One batch included magenta spreen lambsquarters, sorrel, and beet greens; the other was a classic basil pesto with sundried tomatoes from our garden. The bread was from Farm and Sparrow, a local off-grid wood-fired brick oven bakery.

The black bean mole was made with dried shell beans from our summer garden, slow-cooked with mole paste made in the fall from our Pasilla Bajio peppers.  I froze most of the mole paste and now I can unfreeze a few tablespoons of this potent blend and, viola! Spicy summer peppers on the wintertime table!  Along with the beans and mole paste, the other ingredients in this dish were all local: onions from the last farmers market of the year, garlic from our Summer 2008 harvest, and dried oregano from our garden.  

The salsa was made and frozen in the summer with our own tomatoes, onions, garlic and sweet and hot peppers.  I canned the sweet pepper hash with the last of the peppers from our garden back in October (see "Fall Kitchen and Garden Projects" for the recipe), and we cracked open the first jar for this occassion.

The collards were fresh from our garden, where a few intrepid greens are still growing under season-extending floating row cover.

The okra was also from our garden, preserved in the summer using the ancient process of brining.

The sweet potatoes came from Flying Cloud Farm, just over the ridge in Fairview, and the potatoes were a mix of varieties from various local farmers.  I bought the potatoes and sweet potatoes at the last farmers market of the year, and they are still holding up in storage.  These were mashed and creamed with raw buttermilk from Katy, the cow next door, and my first-ever homemade butter, also thanks to Katy.

I made the fruit compote from dried local pears and apples that we dried in the fall.  The fruit was slow-cooked with local honey and spices.  A little (very non-local) Nicaraguan rum that Melissa brought back from her travels made this steamy dessert concoction even more warming on a winter night. The hot compote was perfect on homemade ice cream (from still MORE of Katy the cow's milk), churned on site by Dana-Dee.

To drink, we had home-fermented Quince Mead, Blackberry Mead, and Crabapple Scrumpy.

Hurrah for local food!

Local food cheerleaders in Australia (more info on the radical cheerleaders of Adelaide, Australia here) ... note the fabulous artichoke, fork, and knife team logo on their team t-shirts...ah, thanks be to google image...

Making Mole - Tasty Tonic Food for Winter Well-Being

This year we grew heirloom Pasilla Bajio peppers (pictured at left), a mild, sweet-hot, long, wrinkley, dark green pepper that turns deep chocolate brown as it ripens. Its one of the many types of peppers traditionally used in Mexican mole.

Mole (pronounced "moe-lay") means "sauce" in Spanish - read more about mole here.

Last night, I decided to try my hand at a mole paste, which I will describe after the following disclaimer:

*Disclaimer!* There are an almost infinite variety of highly personalized mole recipes, incorporating regional traditions and generations of mole-making expertise handed down from mothers to daughters, guarded as family secrets, perfected and adapted, with each mole sauce embodying the unique culinary magic and heritage of the person (usually a woman) stirring the pot. This is NOT one of those moles. I humbly acknowledge that it is a non-traditional, bastardized, white-Southern-hippie-anarchist-vegetarian-novice first time gringa mole. Traditional moles can require a whole day in the kitchen, sweating and toasting and grinding and stirring. Mine takes a little more than an hour. Although I think it tastes pretty darn good, it is not in the same universe with traditional moles.

Peppers toasting in the skillet

So. This mole only uses one kind of pepper rather than 3, 4, or 5 varieties. If you use more varieties, you can achieve complex subtle pepper flavor combinations. I also used only pumpkin seeds rather than the blends of almonds, sesame seeds, and other seeds and nuts that may be included in other moles. I wanted to use as many local ingredients as possible, and pumpkin seeds are nutritious, affordable, and locally plentiful. I used honey instead of sugar, and left out the chopped bread/cookies/crackers and/or tortillas that some moles include.


Spices awaiting grinding








Without further ado, here is the recipe:

Gringa Mole Paste

Makes about 1 quart

20 Pasilla Bajio peppers
20 cloves of garlic
3 oz. raisins*
2 generous tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. pepper
1 tsp. oregano
1 Tbs. cumin
1/2 tsp. ground cloves or 7 or 8 whole cloves
2 tsp. ground cinnamon
1/4- 1/2 tsp cayenne powder depending on how hot you like it
1/2 tsp chili powder
1/3 cup honey
1 cup pumpkin seeds
3 oz. unsweetened baking chocolate

• Wash the peppers under cold water. Remove the seeds and stems.
• Heat up a cast iron skillet and toast the peppers in batches. Use a tiny bit of oil in the skillet -- I used virgin coconut oil. Cook the peppers just until they soften and brown a bit. This is going to make your house smell really good.
  
• Meanwhile, roast the garlic. I usually do this in the toaster oven. Leave the garlic unpeeled to roast - you can peel it after roasting.
  
• When all of the peppers are cooked, put them in a large bowl and cover with boiling water. Add the raisins and cover with a cloth or dishtowel. Let sit for 1/2 hour or until everything is soft and the raisins are "plumped up."
• While you are soaking the peppers and raisins, toast the pumpkin seeds lightly, until they're golden brown.
• Drain the peppers and raisins and retain the soaking water.
  
• Grind all of the spices together with a mortar and pestle.
• Melt the chocolate. Peel the garlic.
  
• Blenderize or process in a food processor the pumpkin seeds, honey, garlic, and spices, adding a little soaking water to make the blades turn if necessary. Add the peppers, raisins, and melted chocolate, and continue adding soaking water until you achieve the desired consistency.

The final result should be a thick paste that you can dilute with water, stock, or tomato sauce (or any combination of these), adding sauteed or roasted onions and garlic to make delectable sauces for whatever you are cooking up.

Throw a dollop in your refried beans, use it to spice up burritos or enchiladas, mix with stock and tomato paste as a spicy/sweet marinade for baked beans, or use in the traditional way, as a sauce in which to slow-cook meats.

Mole paste can be refrigerated and used over a few weeks, or frozen and used through the winter as a way to bring your summery chili peppers from the garden to the table through the cold months.

Finished mole paste in a jar

More to Mole than Fabulous Flavor?

As I was making the mole, I was thinking about what a great tonic food it is -- a medicinal combination of foods perfect for fall and winter well-being. The ingredients are a perfect nutritional blend to help keep the immune system strong through the changing seasons and to keep us feeling good physically and emotionally as winter arrives.

Local honey and garlic are well-known immune boosters.
Peppers contain capsaicinoids, which trigger the release of endorphins which can help fight seasonal depression. Capsaicinoids also increase metabolism, which seems perfect for the arrival of winter, when we have less opportunity for physical activity. Raisins are high in phenols--powerful antioxidants that are also found in chocolate. Pumpkin seeds contain phytochemicals with anti-inflammatory properties, and are packed with protein and nutrition. Dark chocolate is full of the aforemmentioned antioxidants, and triggers the release in the brain of oxytocin, a hormone and neurotransmitter that is linked to feelings of well-being.

Oxytocin is a facinating biological phenomenon -- it's released during breast feeding and is linked to mother-child bonding. It is also released by hugging, social bonding, sexual arousal and orgasm, and by sharing food in low light. The release of oxytosin is triggered more by certain foods than others. At the top of the list of foods that cause the body to release oxytosin: chocolate and peppers.

Could mole be the perfect fall and winter tonic food to supercharge your immune system, keep you healthy, boost your metabolism and lift your spirits?

Maybe so. But beyond the punch it packs for winter wellness, it is worth eating for taste alone. My nontraditional gringa batch turned out rich, complex, and fabulously delicious. I used some last night to make a hearty stew of black beans, onions, greens, and sweet peppers, which we served with mashed sweet potatoes, guacamole, raw cheddar cheese, sour cream, and tortillas. Mmmmm.

~~~

*A note on raisins: I used all organic ingredients for my version, but if you're not going to go 100% organic, you might consider making sure that at least your raisins of the organic persuasion, since non-organic raisins, affectionately known in my family as "pesticide pellets" contain high levels of toxic chemicals.

End-of-season Peppers

Earlier this week, we finally pulled the last of the pepper plants after nursing them along, covering them at night, and giving them a few more days, a few more days to finish their ripening.

Normally you would not see a green pepper in our kitchen. The ubiquitous green bell pepper found on salad bars, on top of pizzas, and in supermarkets everywhere across this great land is simply an unripe yellow, orange, or red pepper. I find green peppers unappetizing, and they are hard for our bodies digest (especially raw), but nonetheless green bell peppers seem to be consumed like they're going out of style. I have heard that the only reason the green bell pepper is part of the modern American diet at all is that it is easier to transport and less perishable when it is unripe than when it matures to yellow, orange, or red.

In any case, since the lows were fixing to be in the 20s, we gave up waiting and brought all of the remaining peppers in from the garden to ripen. The big, luscious yellow peppers that you see in the photo are the variety Corno di Toro Giallo, an Italian heirloom that was our heaviest-producing pepper this year. Orchid Peppers, the red crumpled-looking peppers that you can see in the upper left corner of the photo, were the most ornamental of the peppers we grew this year, with the Purple Cayenne coming in a close second. Other peppers in the mix pictured here include Golden Treasure, Red Cheese (pimento), Hotwax, Romanian, Jimmy Nardello, and Pacia Bajio (which ripen to a dark brown). You can buy seeds for all of these heirloom varieties from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds.

Fall Kitchen and Garden Projects & Recipes

Most of the flat surfaces in our little house are covered with various fall garden and kitchen projects -- soaking spinach seeds, drying harvested beans and sunflower seeds, processing vegetables for salsa, pickles, and other preserving projects, and too many other large and small projects to list. I love the end of the summer growing season--putting the garden to bed and putting food away for the cold months, planting fall greens, saving seeds, pickling things.

I've posted a few pictures of some of these projects, followed by two October-appropriate recipes.

Above: The kitchen table covered with projects in process--peppers for sweet pepper hash (recipe below); green tomatoes for brine-pickling (recipe below); zinnia, marigold, and sunflower seeds for planting next year; winter squash curing; tomatoes and peppers for salsa; love-lies-bleeding amaranth seed heads to be threshed for eating and replanting


Left: Christopher shelling dry black beans with moral support from Frankie















Left: Prepping a bed for fall planting, after pulling summer bean and squash plants














Left: Fall lettuce starts in the garden










Below: "Red Zinger" hibiscus and climbing nasturtium seed pods drying...most of the hibiscus will be for tea and the rest will be for planting next year














Fall Recipes:

Brine-Pickled Green Tomatoes
This is a great way to use tomatoes that you have to pick green as cold weather ends the tomato season. My recipe is loosely based on one from Marilyn Kluger's classic book "Preserving Summer's Bounty."

Ingredients:
Unripe tomatoes to fill a jar or ceramic crock
Pickling spices to taste
Fresh or dried dill to taste
10-20 cloves garlic, peeled
Apple cider vinegar
High-quality salt (I use coarse celtic sea salt)
Water

• Wash and clean tomatoes -- make sure not to use any tomatoes with cracks, mold, or rotted spots
• Layer the bottom of a ceramic crock or large glass jar (such as a cookie jar) with spices and dill. I use various combinations of dill, whole black pepper corns, celery seed, caraway seed, and whole mustard seed.
• Fill the crock or jar with tomatoes and garlic
• Mix your brine solution using the following proportions: for every gallon of water, use 1 cup of vinegar and 2/3 cup salt
• Pour the brine over the tomatoes and garlic to cover, with at least an inch of brine above the top layer.
• Place a glass or china plate on top of the tomatoes to keep them submerged, and weigh down by sitting a jar filled with water on top of the plate.
• Cover with a clean cloth and wait!
• Don't stir, but do remove any scum or mold that may form.
• After 3 weeks or so of fermentation, pack into jars and either heat process (which will kill the beneficial live cultures) or just refrigerate (keeping in mind that the pickles will not keep as long without heat processing). I never heat process brined pickles because I want to keep the food alive after fermentation.
  

Sweet Pepper Hash
I learned this recipe from my friend Melissa years ago when we lived together. It is so ridiculously delicious that I've made it every year since when local peppers are ripe. You can find a version of this in "Preserving Summer's Bounty" too, but mine omits green peppers, which are not ripe and so not nearly as sweet as red, yellow, and orange ones, and uses honey instead of sugar. I think honey tastes much better in this recipe, and makes for a nice syrupy texture--plus, honey is better for you and is available locally (unlike cane sugar). You can also add a hot pepper or two to make a spicier hash.

At left: the hash before cooking and canning


This recipe makes about 3 pints. We usually at least double it. Opening up a jar in mid-winter is like a taste of summer -- a blast of bright, sunshiny, summer sweetness. Use it as a condiment, or mix in with soups or baked beans -- it's so addictive that we've been known to eat it straight by the spoonful.

Ingredients:

12 small onions
24 ripe sweet peppers of various varieties
2 cups honey
2 cups apple cider vinegar
2 Tbs Salt

• Peel the onions and remove the seeds from the peppers.
  
• Chop the vegetables by hand or use a food processor to chop into relatively small pieces.
• Put your chopped onions and peppers in a big bowl and sprinkle with the salt.
• Pour boiling water over the vegetables and let stand for 15 minutes.
• Combine the honey and vinegar in a large pot and bring to a boil.
• Drain the peppers and onions and add to the boiling syrup.
  
• Reduce heat and cook slowly for 15 minutes.
• Meanwhile, sterilize jars and lids in a boiling water bath
  
• Pack into sterilized jars, leaving 1/4 inch head space.
• Adjust lids and process for 5-10 minutes in a boiling water bath.
  

Peppers and cabbage

Cabbage is "heading up" --here are some of our cabbage babies (Early Jersey Wakefield) with some kale and the ever-persistant milkweed (on the right side between the two right-most cabbages) poking its head up in the middle of a veggie bed.

We are planting a bunch of pepper varieties -- Corno di Toro, an Italian heirloom (Horn of the Bull!), Black Hungarian, Pasilla Bajio (from Mexico, used in mole), Golden Treasure (another old variety from Italy), Long Purple Cayenne, Red Cheese Pimento, Hungarian Hot Wax (pictured below), Jimmy Nardello, Romanian Hot, and the very intriguing Orchid Pepper, of which a google image search yeilds nothing. What will it look like? Who can say. Baker Creek says it is ornamental, and the peppers are "orchid shaped." I eagerly await its fruiting.


Hungarian Hot Wax


Pasillo Bajio


Jimmy Nardello....an old farmers market favorite of mine ... we're growing starts from Sugar Creek Farm from seeds they saved last year.