Klo, I hope your DH is dong better! It is hard to find a safe, approved recipe that produces candied jalapenos like the ones you can buy for $6.00 or $7.00 a jar, but this recipe is close, is safety-approved, and the people I've given these to just love them. It really is just a bread-and-butter pickle recipe but you use jalapeno peppers instead of pickling cucumbers. I found this recipe posted by J. R. Slick on the Harvest Forum last summer. Here it is: BREAD & BUTTER JALAPENOS (CANDIED JALAPENOS) Yield: 7 pints 4 lbs. jalapeno peppers 2 lbs. onions 3 C. vinegar 2 C. sugar 2 T. mustard seed 2 t. turmeric 2 t. celery seed 1 t. ginger 1. Wearing rubber or latex gloves to protect your hands from pepper juices, cut jalapeno peppers and onions into thin slices and cold-pack into canning jars. 2. Place remaining ingredients in saucepan and bring to a boil. 3. Pour hot mixture into jars, leaving 1/4" head space. 4. Remove air bubbles and wipe rims. 5. Place lids on jars and adjust to finger-tight. 6. Process in a Boiling Water Bath for 10 minutes. **Sometimes I run out of brine before I run out of jars filled with peppers/onions, so sometimes I make a batch and a half to ensure I have enough. Here's a second recipe for Sweet Jalapenos. It is from the new Better Homes and Gardens "You Can Can" book. I'm going to try this one this week, although it really isn't that different from the above recipe. SWEET JALAPENO SLICES Yield: 3 to 4 pints 1 lb. fresh jalapeno peppers, stemmed, halved, seeded and cut into 1/2" slices 1 large red sweet pepper, cut into 1/4" slices 1/2 C. chopped onion (1 medium onion) 1 T. pickling salt cracked ice 1 & 1/4 C. sugar 1/2 C. cider vinegar 1 t. mustard seeds 1/2 t. celery seeds 1/2 t. ground turmeric 1. In a large bowl, combine the jalapeno peppers, sweet pepper, onion, and pickling salt. Add 2" of cracked ice. Cover and chill for 2 hours. 2. Remove any remaining ice and drain mixture into a large colander. 3. In a large stainless-steel, enamel, or nonstick saucepan, combine the sugar, vinegar and spices. Heat mixture to boiling. Stir in drained pepper mixture. Return to boiling. Ladle pepper mixture into hot, sterilized half-pint canning jars, leaving a 1/2" headspace. Wipe jar rims; adjust lids. Process in a boiling water bath canner for 15 minutes (start timing when water returns to boil). Remove jars from canner; cool on wire racks. NOTE: Because chile peppers, such as jalapenos, contain oils that can burn skin and eyes, avoid direct contact with them as much as possible. Wear plastic or rubber gloves while preparing them. If bare hands should touch a chile pepper, wash them well with soap and water. Diane, There are lots of ways to make grilled, baked or broiled jalapeno poppers and I don't really have a recipe per se. Here's how I make them. First, I cut the peppers in half lengthwise and deseed them. (Some folks leave the seeds in, but I can't eat them if I do that.) Secondly, I mix together a package of cream cheese that has been allowed to soften a little at room temperature with some grated cheddar cheese. Sometimes, for a different taste, I use Monterrey Jack. Then I 'stuff' each pepper half with cheese. Third, I cut uncooked bacon slices in half and wrap them around the jalapeno or, if the jalapenos are really large, I just lay a piece of bacon on top of each cheese-stuffed pepper. You then can cook them however you choose. You can grill them on the outdoor grill. Cook them until the bacon is thoroughly cooked. You can line them up on a cookie sheet (with raised sides like a jelly roll pan to contain the bacon drippings) and bake or broil them in the oven. I usually just bake them for about 23-35 minutes at 350 or 375 degrees. You can cook them a few at a time on a George Foreman grill indoors, but if you're doing a large batch, this could take a while and you have to be sure the bacon covers the cheese so the cheese doesn't stick to the top of the Foreman grill. I just cook them until the bacon is well done. Be careful not to overstuff the peppers or the cheese will ooze out. Sometimes, if I am running 'late' on preparing a meal, I'll put a broiler pan full of bacon in the oven and pre-cook it until it is about halfway done while I'm deseeding and stuffing the peppers. That can cut the baking or grilling time about in half. If you broil them, watch them carefully so they don't burn. You can be creative with this recipe. Some people mix some sausage in with the cheese and omit the bacon. In the summertime, I slice and deseed jalapeno peppers and freeze them so I can make poppers in the gardening off-season. We could eat these things all day long. If you're a hot pepper wimp like I am, the fat in the cheese and bacon really make the heat from the pepper more tolerable. Dawn

Dianne, You're welcome. I have been on a pepper-processing marathon since they have overperformed this year, and it is seemingly impossible to make anything too hot for our darling new daughter-in-law. (Lord knows that if the stuff I've made these last couple of weeks isn't hot enough for her, it won't be because I haven't tried!) Have you ever made Habanero Gold jelly? It is incredibly good and it uses dried apricots as the base flavor, and you spice it up with onion and peppers. The onion and peppers are diced into 1/8" pieces, which is very tedious BUT gives you a beautiful golden jelly with confetti-like pieces of peppers and onions suspended in the jelly like little pieces of confetti. I've made several batches. I started out following the directions exactly, and that batch, which has 1/4 cup of habaneros was a pleasant blend of hot and sweet that even I can eat. So, striving to make it hotter for DH and DDIL, I altered the next batch to double the peppers to 1/2 cup, which can be done safely by decreasing the amount of sweet red bell and red onion by 1/4 cup. That was a lot hotter,but probably not hot enough for them. So, in the most recent batch, I tripled the habs to 3/4s of a cup, and further reduced the sweet red bell/red onion part of the recipe accordingly. The Extra Extra Hot Habanero Gold actually is very, very hot and I am not going to attempt a batch with 1 full cup of habaneros because I don't think anyone could eat it. I had the tiniest taste of the Extra Extra Hot and was sure I had burned a hole in my tongue. I think I have made 5 or 6 batches of Habanero Gold this summer, all because the darned habaneros just wouldn't stop pumping out peppers. Then, 3 of the 4 habanero plants abrupted wilted and died and I took them out, which yielded a huge amount of habs stripped off the dead plants and I've been struggling with this pile of habs all week. Another day or two, and they'll be history. (I still have the equally hot, if not hotter, Red Savina peppers growing though.) It also has been a long salsa summer. I know I have made at least 6 batches of canned salsa, and every single one of them from a different recipe so we'll have a wide variety of flavors from which to choose. I'm still not sure I've reached the ultimate degree of hot salsa that DDIL craves, but I'm getting there. I believe I have at least 3 more batches of hotter salsa left to put up if the peppers and tomatoes cooperate. These will have more habaneros and serranos and maybe some chile tepins as well. My favorite salsa so far this summer has five different kinds of hot pepper that smelled hotter than h-e-double hockey sticks when we had cut up all the raw ingredients and first combined them into the big stockpot. Once it was cooked and blended, though, it didn't taste as hot as it had smelled. It is a great salsa, but it isn't going to burn anyone's taste buds off their tongue. While the onions and potatoes underperformed this summer (that foot of rain in one day in April was very hard on them), the peppers and tomatoes have made up for it, so I've been a pepper-preserving maniac, with hundreds of peppers in the freezer and all kinds of preserved peppers, including bread-and-butter jalapenos, canned jalapeno rings, and bread-and-butter habaneros (mixed with some other peppers to tone down the heat--and the heat is incredibly high). I suspect that I could skip growing peppers next year because I have at least a two year's supply preserved and plants still covered in more peppers, but I'll grow them next year for fresh eating anyway. My son insists that no matter how much salsa is canned and put away in the root cellar (actually, it is a tornado shelter if you want to get picky!), "it won't be enough". I am actually getting tired of peppers and tomatoes and have started making fruit jams and jellies now because we like homemade ones better than those from the store. It has been a great pepper year, so maybe I'll mix some peppers into some of the fruit jellies. I wonder what Strawberry-Jalapeno or Strawberry-Habanero would taste like? I've linked one of the many Hananero Gold threads from the Harvest Forum below. I think both the big batch and the original batch recipes are in the second post on this thread. I've used up all my dried apricots and might try the next batch with either dried pears or dried peaches.\ Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Habanero Gold Thread From Harvest Forum

Yeah, your right. I probably did not address the initial question so well. I just made risotto so i went a bit nutty with suggestions. I'm packing up right now for the mountains where my garden is. A bit off the grid so i have to think 'outside the box'. (wood heat, wood fired grill, wood fired hot tub). I prep everything here at home. I was going to prep a 'risotto packet' for the lamb shank for tonight but we over-did the risotto all week...two dinners and lunch left-overs... I made a potato packet instead. And potato salad and foccacia that needs a bit of potato. (and pickles, and a greek cucumber salad, lol, and pasta salad, and a cold salmon salad, and a fruit salad, and a goat cheese rolled in chia seed and then fresh herbs) The potato packet for the grill is foil, two layers formed in a pie plate, lined with parchment. The bottom is slices of raw sweet potato, onion, rosemary and evoo. I took half of my cooked potatoes for the salad and smashed them and layed them on the base and closed the parchment, then secured the foil tight. It will go right on the non-flame part of the grill. I could have done the same with the risotto and considered it but we over did the risotto all week. The sweet potato would give enough moisture to 're-heat' the risotto. Would have been great with the lamb. Instead i froze most of the left-overs for another quickie meal in a few weeks. Probably slow heat in the oven, covered, with maybe smoke roasted pork from a recent grilling/smokin'. Very sad about RV fires on the road. I do see it often and wonder what happened... Husbands 45min commute took 4 hours last night, stuck on the GW bridge...an RV fire. We took one long memorable road trip all over the southern states a few years ago. Crazy fun. Propane left on? Jolted a stove burner? An appliance left plugged in? Sad.

Here's the Habanero Gold Jelly, invented by Bob Rouleau of Ottawa, Canada. It's in the Bernardin book and now in the new "Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving." Habanero Gold Jelly 1/3 cup finely sliced dried apricots 3/4 cup white vinegar 1/4 up finely diced red onion 1/4 cup finely diced sweet red pepper 1/4 cup finely diced habanero peppers, including seeds OR 1/4 cup diced, combined jalapeno and Scotch Bonnet peppers 3 cups granulated sugar 1 pouch Bernardin liquid pectin (For USA other brands of liquid pectin are fine) Cut apricots into 1/8 inch slices. Measure into a large deep stainless steel saucepan with vinegar; let stand 4 hours. Individually, cut onion and seeded peppers into 1/8 inch slices; cut slices into 1/4 inch dice. Measure each ingredient; add to apricots. Stir in sugar. Over high heat, bring to a full roiling boil. Stirring constantly, boil hard 1 minute. Remove from heat. Immediately stir in pectin, mixing well. Pour jelly into hot jar, dividing solids equally among jars and filling each jar to within 1/4 inch of top rim. Wipe rims. Apply lids. Process 10 minutes in BWB. Cool upright, until lids pop down, about 30 minutes. When lids are concave but the jelly is still hot, carefully grasp jar without disturbing lid and invert, twist, or rotate each jar to distribute solids throughout jelly. The jar can be inverted temporarily but do not allow it to stand upside-down for prolonged periods. Repeat as necessary during the cooling/setting time, until solids are nicely suspended. Here's the Peach Preserves for Winter Mornings, created by Doris, a CF member. Peach Preserves for Cold Mornings (Doris, Ruddmd) 3 pounds ripe peaches, peeled and quartered l/2 medium-size orange, quartered and seeded 2 Red Savina habaneros, (seeds and all) 4 cups sugar 1/4 teaspoon almond extract 3/4 Cup honey (the lightest, mildest you can find) Combine peaches, sugar, and honey in a Dutch oven; stir well. Cover and let stand 45 minutes. Place knife blade attachment in food processor bowl; add orange quarters and habanero chiles. Process until finely chopped, stopping once to scrape down sides. Place orange, habanero chiles, and an equal amount of water in a medium saucepan. Bring to a boil; cover, reduce heat, and simmer 10 minutes or until orange rind is tender. Bring peach mixture to a boil over medium heat, stirring until sugar dissolves. Increase heat to medium-high, and cook, uncovered, 15 minutes, stirring often. Add orange mixture. Bring to a boil; cook, uncovered, 20 to 25 minutes or until candy thermometer registers 221, stirring often. Remove from heat; stir in almond extract. Skim off foam with a metal spoon. Quickly pour hot mixture into hot, sterilized jars, leaving 1/4-inch headspace; wipe jar rims. Cover at once with metal lids, and screw on bands. Process jars in boiling-water bath 10 minutes. Yield: 6 half-pints. I see earlier in this thread the question was asked about what to do with a jam that's too stiff. The best thing to do (to avoid further cooking) is just to stir in a tablespoon or so of hot water when you open the jar. Whatever is needed to achieve the looseness you want. Carol