Garden Update – August 22, 2011

Another quick garden update, plus putting some of my harvest to work. Read on!

Peas: So I planted a new batch of peas in a different area of the garden, rotating the crops like a good farmer. After a week or so, all the peas started growing and were about 2 inches high. Then one day I came home from work and every last one was pulled up and/or eaten off. I assume it was the chipmunks, but at this point who knows. I guess they didn't want the ones I planted in the spring, but late summer they liked. I can't figure it out any more.

Pumpkins: These made a really good comeback, as the vines are rapidly growing and spreading. I've seen plenty of blossoms, but no pumpkins are growing. I'm thinking something is eating the blossoms before they can germinate. We'll have to wait and see what happens here.

Pumpkins

Tomatoes: I've caught the squirrels eating a couple of the tomatoes, but there still seem to be plenty on the vines. For some reason though none are starting to turn red. Very strange, but I'm hoping that they will soon...and I'll get to them before the squirrels do.

Tomatoes

Tomatoes

Blackberries: I'm finally getting some! They are really tart, but great tasting. There hasn't been enough to make anything with, but I'm fine with them as a snack.

Blackberries

Peppers: All my pepper plants are doing great, although I've had many of the peppers rot out before I have a chance to pick them. I'm finding that I have to check them almost every day, and even if they haven't turned red/finished growing, if they start to get tender and rotten, I can pick them and salvage part of the pepper.

Peppers

And best of all are my chili pepper plants. I've had a ton of hot peppers ripen up over the past couple of weeks, and I was planning to string them up and dry them out for hot pepper flakes. But then, one day while reading a competitor's magazine, I found a recipe for making your own hot pepper sauce. I love hot pepper sauces, and the recipe sounded easy enough, so I thought this would be a great way to use the peppers up. So that's what I did -- and here's what happened.

Making Hot Pepper Sauce

My batch of chili peppers

Step 1: The first step was to roast the hot peppers under the broiler to sear the skin. This would make it easier to peel the skins away, which made sense. So I lined them all up on my broiler pan, put them in the oven, and in less than 2 minutes the peppers started exploding in the oven! Either I didn't have the right type of chili peppers, or the guy who did this recipe didn't test it well enough. I pulled the peppers out but not before I had guts and seeds all over the inside of the oven. I put them in a bowl with plastic wrap on top to seal in the heat and try to get them to shrink so the peels would come off. This didn't work, but what did happen was worse: the exploding peppers released their heat into the air of the kitchen and soon permeated the entire house. Sage came into the kitchen and started gagging it was so strong. We opened up the place, started the fans and tried to air the place out while I went on to the next step.

Step 2: As I said, the peppers wouldn't peel, so I ended up just cutting them up as they were. They went into the food processor and I added some fresh basil, dried oregano, a pinch of celery seed, and some crushed garlic. I processed this all up until it was really mushy, and then added vinegar slowly until the sauce reached a pretty good consistency. Finally I mixed in some salt and pepper.

Step 3: This left me with a chunky sauce, so I needed to strain away the seeds and pepper skins. I poured the chunky sauce into a mesh sieve and pressed it down to get all the good juice without any of the chunks.

My chunky sauce, being strained.

Straining the sauce

It turns out that NOT peeling the skins off the peppers wasn't a big deal at all. I noticed that the final sauce was pretty runny, and I should have realized that the amount of vinegar I added at the processing stage should have been less, but it's not terrible by any means. I'll remember that tip for next time.

The finished product.

I tasted the sauce and it was REALLY HOT -- way hotter than Tabasco. The recipe said it's supposed to be good for up to a month, and I doubt I could use this much (as hot as it is) in a month, but I'm already ready to whip up some eggs or make a pot of rice just to pour it on.