You want it HOW hot?

One of the places I keep finding myself lingering in the garden is by the pepper plants. I tend to avoid the tomatoes - that's been such a disappointment this year that I don't even like looking at them much. Either the plants are dying or the weeds are crazy or the tomatoes seem like they won't ripen or they rot instead. Blah.

But the peppers! Oh the peppers!

The peppers are doing so well that the plants are getting bent over with the weight. I planted them sort of close to each other, reading quite some time back that they like to "touch shoulders" - I guess this is to shade the lower parts of the plants (or perhaps the peppers themselves?). Whatever the reasoning in, my plants are TOTALLY touching shoulders, and they've got marigolds interplanted with them, and they just keep cranking out more peppers and it's just amazing.

I know, I know, shut up about the peppers, right?

Sorry - not gonna happen!

I decided I wanted to do SOMETHING more with them than just pick off one here or there for a recipe....and so it was time to start harvesting and putting some away.... Since I don't want to take TOO much from the sweet peppers just yet, I decided to pick jalapenos, serrano and cayenne peppers (and some called Kung Pao, which I honestly believe are a variety of cayenne?). So I grabbed a mixing bowl, picked maybe 1/4 of the jalapenos from the plants, put an overgrown chard leaf to keep 'em separate from the serranos (which sometimes look like jalapenos on a diet to me), and then picked serranos (maybe 1/4 of what's on the plants) and cayenne (not EVEN 1/4 of what's on the plants!)

Turns out it was over 3lbs of peppers!!! It may not look like much, but trust me...it's alotta peppers!


Rather than make a mess or fume up the kitchen, I took a cutting board and knife out to the deck and got to work. I should've timed myself! Here's all the peppers, chopped up nicely. I love how just a few have turned red - what a beautiful contrast with the intense green!


Knowing there's no way we'll ever want more than just a little of the hot peppers at anyone time, and not wanting to deal with a big frozen block of hot peppers, I cut FoodSaver bags into smaller sizes (the 8" wide roll was getting cut into three strips), sealed the cut edges, filled 'em and sealed 'em. Thankfully Brett offered to help, and he volunteered for bag-making rather than dealing with touching the hot peppers.


There's a gallon bag filled with a BUNCH of little FoodSaver vaccu bags of peppers, with each bag containing maybe 2-3 peppers worth of just one variety. That used up maybe a third of all the peppers I chopped up, so I dumped the remaining chopped peppers into 1-gallon zip lock bags, each variety in their own bag, and frozen 'em as is. I need to break 'em up and make sure there's no big chunks of frozen peppers we won't be able to separate when needed.

If anyone has recommendations on how to better store peppers, please share! Right now we're using A LOT of plastic bags. I'm considering making chipotles this fall - wait til most of the jalapenos turn red, then smoke and dry them. To do this I'll want to look into getting a dehydrator probably.... I wonder if any of the other peppers benefit from smoking/drying, or just drying?