More Things to Do With Peppers

Festive holiday ristra

In my last post I went into some detail on how easy it is to preserve peppers by pickling. And while I do pickle quite a lot of the range of hot peppers I grow every year to supply my heat-loving family and friends and allow for the several levels and types of hot pepper sauces I make for steady customers in my region, my favorite thing to do with hot peppers is to dry them.

The sauce and pot peppers, as well as sweet peppers and mild chilis like poblanos are usually frozen whole or chopped in zip lock freezer bags. It’s easy to break off a chunk and toss into any dish I’m making, and this is to my taste buds the best way to preserve sweet bells. But if you grow a lot of hot chilis like I do, there’s much more you can do through the culinary year with dried peppers than with frozen or pickled or otherwise canned.

I have found some good sources for detailed information on drying peppers and what to do with them afterwards, listed at the bottom of this post. I prefer to sun dry – in my nifty home-made solar dryer out on the front deck – but chilis can easily be dried in a commercial dryer, in the oven on its lowest setting, or in the sun directly if they’re kept whole. Flies and other insects don’t like to congregate on rip hot peppers left in the sun, as they will on tomatoes or other vegetables and fruits that are sliced and placed in the sun to dry. Thick-walled chilis like Anaheims, jalapenos, etc. take longer, of course. Fingerhots, cayennes, thai hots, etc. will dry hard and crisp in just a few hours of sun. Presuming you don’t live in a super high humidity environment, of course.

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My Peck of Pickled Peppers

As the various crops come in – for summer crops that is July through September in my zone 5 here in western NC – I’ll be writing about various methods of preservation. Two weeks ago it was tomatoes. Bushels and bushels of tomatoes. Last week it was the first pints of pear butter (the pears are by no means done falling, so there will be more). This week it’s peppers.

The main pepper crop will not be fully ripe until mid-September, but some bells, cayennes, thai hots, anaheims, poblanos, jalapenos, habaneros and hot banana peppers are making it into the house day to day. By the number of chilis on my pepper list readers may safely surmise that the family and friends of this homestead are fond of peppers with some heat to them. My menfolk subscribe to the culinary philosophy that a good pot of chili and/or beans is hardly worth eating unless it clears out your sinuses and makes you sweat. Things that chili powders, crushed dry peppers, pickled peppers and an assortment of hot sauces ranging from merely Cajun through 3-alarm and Nuclear all the way to Satanic are quite famous for providing.

Capsaicin and a range of capsaicinoid relatives produced by chili peppers are the compounds which provides the heat in peppers. These are classified as irritants to mucus membranes and increases secretion of gastric juices. The hotness (irritant level perceived as heat by nerves, even though the hottest peppers cannot really burn tissue) is measured in Scoville Heat Units [SHUs]. Bell and Cubanelle peppers rate a zero on the scale, with no appreciable hotness. Pimentos and regular banana peppers rate between 100 and 900 SHUs. Anaheims and Poblanos rate 1,000 to 2,500 SHUs, jalapenos 3,500 to 8,000, habaneros can weigh in at 100,000 to 500,000. The hottest peppers – the Peruvian ghost pepper , bhut jolokia peg the meter at a million SHUs or more. You do not want to take a bite out of one of these just to impress your friends at the bar.

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Pears, Pears, Pear Butter!

My Mighty Mama Pear Tree

It’s that time of year again. That late August period when “the world’s biggest pear tree” and all its younger offspring start dropping those little rock-hard cinnamon pears of mysterious variety onto the driveway to be turned into pungent pear mash that draws literal herds of deer, any passing bear within sniffing distance, flocks of turkeys and gaggles of raccoons who can never quite keep up with the bounty.

The big pear tree is 60 feet tall and more than two feet in trunk diameter. It is at least that many years old, all that remains of the original orchard on the property. It’s gorgeous in bloom in the early spring, but quite a headache in late summer as it draws so much wildlife along with swarms of yellow jackets who feast on the mash and rotting fruit beneath the tree and its offspring. About the size of plums, these are not pears that one can readily eat straight off the trees, though they do tend to survive the fall much better than those big commercial pears do. Best I’ve been able to figure from the history of this homestead over 100+ years, the orchard on the high land was planted to support the corn in the bottom land, as part of the sweet mash destined to become moonshine – something of a claim to fame for this region for a bit more than 200 years all told.

Pears are a fruit that isn’t truly ripe until after they’ve been off the tree for a day or two. My pears are not soft even when ripe-ripe. That should serve as a caution to readers who want to try my “easy to do” recipe below for making pear (or apple) butter and are using those big, luscious commercial pears rather than these semi-wild old-timey heirlooms. Those big, soft pears will cook down to mush much quicker than mine.

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Tomatoes, Tomatoes Everywhere!

Bags and boxes and baskets of tomatoes. Romas and Abe Lincolns and some other determinate heirloom I forget the name of. All ruby red and threatening to rot if not processed immediately, no human being can eat enough tomato sandwiches to dent the load.

So it’s been days’ worth of boiling water to loosen skins, a quick cold water bath, peeling, seeding coring, chopping. Having to do it in shifts to give my hands enough time to recover, hoping they don’t turn permanently wrinkled from the effort. Putting up quarts and quarts of tomato juice for drinking just because I can, and we love straight, watery tomato juice. Other boiling pots containing onion ends, the last of last year’s dried leeks and celery, fresh spices, some cuke ends and peels, pole bean pods and such, the accumulated compost of a vegetarian household added to those tomato skins and seeds and cores and trimmings to make broth for soups and stews and greens and those big wintertime pots of beans. Then to can it all in jars and put it away for later consumption.

Canned quarts of quarters. Frozen bags of chunks. Fresh tomato basil soup and tomato sandwiches and good ol’ ‘mater pies… it’s a wonder we haven’t all turned into tomatoes ourselves! And for the bulk of the gleaned harvest (the field entirely organic), drying. The solar dryer has been full of tomato quarters and chunks for days now, as much as that very nifty south porch unit can hold. The sun dries them just enough to move indoors in the evening when the sun goes down, into the oven on its lowest setting of 160 degrees, propped a little open with a spare canning ring, to finish the job. Meanwhile flats of fresh quarters and chunks get prepped for the solar dryer when the sun comes up. Start the whole process over again. Ripest fruits first because this sort of thing takes days and these babies are indeed very ripe.

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Hunger in America: The New Reality

For those of us fond of The Clash and their music, these past few days of London Burning for real have been… surreal. Pushing austerity to its most absurd limits, the government has slashed educational funding, jobs training programs and basic welfare – including for food – across the board just as is happening in this country with radical right-wingers holding the nation hostage in order to secure massive cuts to all forms of social aid – including medical access – in order to keep our several resource wars going indefinitely without having to tax the people making the most money off those wars. Rioting in Greece over austerity measures, in Israel over hard right-wing policies, and the “Arab Spring” that has so far brought down several governments in the Middle East and North Africa while getting NATO involved in Libya, the now 3-year old meltdown of the world economy has things on hair trigger in some rather surprising places.

Americans have not yet hit the streets violently, though things economically show no signs of easing up as markets plunge and hunger raises its ugly head all over the place. ABC News offered a rather amazing article August 8th touting Dumpster Diving as a way to get no-cost food – featuring New York City – that raises far more questions than it could ever possibly answer. Is dumpster diving okay? Is it a threat to public health? Is it acceptable for people to be getting their food this way? My God… what have we come to in this country?

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Wild Foods: Kudzu

In looking around for more information about edibles we can gather without having to grow them in our fields and gardens, I was again reminded of that voracious “Vine that Ate the South” – kudzu. We hear about how the leaves and tender vine ends are high-protein greens either for animal fodder (goats especially love it) or for pot likker greens you can make for dinner. There is usually a sort of side note whenever you read about kudzu that says the root starch is used in China and Japan as “food,” usually unspecified. Those of us who homestead in the south where kudzu has managed to claim millions of acres all for itself, should probably learn about all the ways this plant can be consumed. Not just greens, flower jelly and flower wine.

Originally planted as an ornamental, government and railroad workers planted it across the south in the 1930s for erosion control. It can grow up to 2 feet a day, cover everything in its path, and no known herbicide is ultimately effective against it. The roots can weigh as much as 200 pounds and extend underground to a depth of 10 feet, no topical herbicide is going to kill something like that. All parts of the plant except shallow, bark-covered smaller roots are edible, but it’s unlikely any homestead could consume enough spring shoots, vine ends, leaves or roots in a year to keep it from taking over valuable fields. A herd of goats is about the only thing known to actually keep it under control.

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Food Waste: Compost or More Food?

Following a useful group series called Living Simply: Zero Waste has me thinking about what goodies from the kitchen gets tossed into the compost pile and how much of it might be useful for some other purpose. The series deals with all kinds of waste, of course, the things that go into our trash cans versus what goes into recycling, etc. And readership includes mostly people who live in urban environments. Things like food packaging and general trash items, getting those down as far as possible by recycling things like used batteries, those ‘planned obsolescence’ disposable electronics, plastics, glass, etc.

We homesteaders who have to haul our own trash and recyclables to the “Inconvenient Center” whenever we’ve got time while the darned dumpster station is actually open are pretty good at doing the separating. Especially for things like metals that can not only be recycled, but which we get paid for by the pound. But the question of food waste is quite pertinent this time of year, as crops start coming in and spring beds are cleaned out for fall crop planting. Which I definitely need to do, and would have already done by now if it weren’t so blasted HOT. At any rate, let’s look at the various compostables for what they might be put to best use for, considering how valuable compost actually is for purposes of growing things.

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When the Electricity Goes Out

Over the past two weeks a rather spectacular one-two punch of severe weather wreaked havoc across the eastern half of the nation from Texas to Virginia. Many of us were stunned by the huge, mile-wide F4 tornado that plowed a deadly path through Tuscaloosa and Birmingham, Alabama. That monster and as many as a hundred other tornados killed more than 300 people in 5 states and injured thousands who literally had no place to hide as the winds flattened homes, apartment buildings and businesses completely, even to blasting out the concrete slabs and tearing up streets and sidewalks. It is the deadliest tornado outbreak since the Great Depression.

A friend who lives on a well-planned homestead in southern Tennessee posted on FaceBook about the damage from a tornado in his neck of the woods that downed trees and power lines wholesale, but spared him and his family and even his goats. He was feeling darned lucky even though the devastation across TVA’s service area – and the station blackout that shut down the three reactors at Browns Ferry – made it likely that his ‘stead would be without electricity for days, maybe a week or more. We who live on the land know from experience that we aren’t the first people in line to have our services restored after a nasty storm. First in line are the people in urban areas where shelters and hospitals and emergency services must be restored as quickly as possible to minimize the human cost of nature’s wrath.

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Window Flats and Newspaper Pots

February has always been “The Longest Month” of the year. Which is no doubt why they made it the shortest month of the year. It’s cruel, it’s cold, it’s interminable as the days get longer and the longing for spring becomes almost unbearable. So February is when I start my early spring crops in flats, place them on shelves in the big library window facing south. Up right now and looking good are the Russian Red kale, Winterbore kale, spinach, white and purple onions and a first rush of 60 pea plants.

This February has been warmer than most here in southern Appalachia, which gets our hopes up too high too fast, I know. We can bet real money that it’ll get very cold again very soon, and we just might get a blizzard in March. So I have been careful not to get ahead of myself.

Grandson built a moveable cold frame of salvaged windows that is definitely going to come in handy, but we haven’t really started on the soil turning yet. Need to do that, get the accumulated weeds out, and dig in some good compost. We built a nifty pea support contraption yesterday of PVC, over which we can add the actual string supports when the bed’s ready. Then we can plant the first rush seedlings on one side, and direct seed a second rush on the other side to extend our crop and harvest time. Spinach seedlings will go in with direct-seeded lettuces, and the kales will go into a separate bed I’ll interplant with radishes.

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Finally! The Last of the Pumpkins

Having battled out of control pumpkin vines all summer, I’m glad to report that the last of the pumpkin harvest is finally complete. It rained so much that several rotted on the ground, they’ve been tossed into the compost bin from which I expect next year’s greedy vines will take off. I’d planted an heirloom variety of pie-size pumpkins, not realizing that everywhere there was a leaf there would root a whole new vine. Thus the minimal planting of only 4 vines ended up literally everywhere! It grew over the mints and into the brick pathway. It grew through the roses and tried to cover the grapes. It grew out into the 3rd goal disc golf fairway and down the hill towards the bottomland drop-off. I was literally lopping off new vines daily just to keep some control (and some of my other crops)! Since the compost bin is on the fairway side of the garden, I’m going to go ahead and let the pumpkins have it next year.

Now, processing pumpkins – even pie-size pumpkins of 5 pounds or less – is an arduous task taking lots of time and energy. I spread it out over a couple of weeks, once haviing brought them inside when the temperature dropped to freezing. Once frost is upon them they go fast. Protected from frost in a dry, cool basement or root cellar, they’ll keep for months. So while it’s possible to avoid all that processing by spreadiing it out over the entire winter one pumpkin at a time, pumpkin simply doesn’t last long enough around this homestead to justify not doing it all at once well before the holiday season. I’ve got grandkids who can each eat an entire pie at a single sitting, and grown relatives who fully expect their pumpkin/hickory nut bread along with the fudge and cookies in December (my standard Christmas gifting). One thing you never want to do is find yourself processing a pumpkin at the same time you’re baking cookies/bread and making fudge. You’ll end up not sleeping for days…

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