Welcome to my Blog

Hi, my name is Suanne and I am writing this blog to share some of the tips and recipes I have learned or created with our backyard garden. The garden itself is actually my husband John's but we have had a garden for over 25 years so I have picked up some garden knowledge along the way. We live in Austin, Texas so we are blessed with a year long growing season. We always have something to eat from the garden and this pretty much dictates what we eat. All of our meals are planned around what happens to be growing at the time. One of the biggest challenges is what I like to call crop maintenance. What to do with all of the vegetables? Beyond sharing with the neighbors and friends I am always trying creative approaches to preparing the bounty. So the blog seemed like a good way to both keep track of and share my recipes.

Monday, September 27, 2010

A peck of peppers


We pulled out all the pepper plants today and picked everything on them. We ended up with a huge basket of jalipenos, serranos, anaheims and pablanos. So what to do?

Pickled peppers
I pickled one jar of the jalipenos which just involved boiled a mixture of half vengar andf half water and a teaspoon of pickling slat (actually I used Kosher - not real sure the difference) I put the washed and stemmed peppers in a sterilized jar. To sterilize you can run the jars through the dishwasher or boil in water for 5-10 minutes. I added some pickling spices - allspice and mustard seeds. Cover the peppers with the boiled vinegar mixture. Now if you want to put this on a shelf you can boil the jars to seal. But I just put the jar in the refrigerator as I only made one. It will take a couple of days though before they are ready.



Frozen Pepper Mash
This is an easy way to preserve peppers. I used the pablanos and a few serranos and cut the steps and seeds out. I added these (about 6 cups) to a food processor with just about 1/2 cup of water. Process until they are ground. Add these to ice cube trays and freeze. You can remove the cubes from the tray when they are frozen and store in a zip lock in the freezer. To use take one out, thaw and you can add to any recipe that calls for peppers.


We then roasted, peeled and chopped the annaheims for Green Chili.

Its time for the fall garden

















Well John has pretty much changed out the garden to the fall garden. We ripped out the peppers today and planted the radishes, parnsips and all the slaw crops. The cucumbers and zucchini are doing nicely but we don't have any fruit on them yet. We did plant something new this years as a fall crop - butternut squash. We were out of town for a couple of weeks and when we got back we have 3 very nice sized squash. We harvested a basket full of peppers and I had to scramble to figure out what to do with them but I will detail that on a separate post.