Make a ristra!

--Robert

This reminds me, one year we decorated our Christmas tree with almost nothing more than strings and strings of dried Thai Hots. I planted out 11 of them that year.

George

Dawn - wanna share that Cranberry/Pepper Jelly recipe please?

Paula

Paula,

I'm always glad to share. I have several recipes and some call for fresh cranberries and the others for cranberry juice or cranberry juice concentrate since cranberries are not available year-round. I'm going to post several. I like them all.

HABANERO-CRANBERRY JELLY (Yield: 7-8 8-oz. jars)

3/4 C. cider vinegar
3/4 C. white vinegar
2 C. 100% unsweetened cranberry juice
1/2 C. finely diced habanero pepper (can substitute equal amount of any pepper)
1/2 C. finely diced red onion
1 3/4 C. fresh cranberries, coarsely chopped
1 pkg. liquid pectin
5 C. sugar

1. Finely dice peppers and onions and coarsely chop cranberries.
2. In a large saucepan, combine cranberries, pepper, onion, vinegars and juice.
3. Bring to a boil and then reduce heat to low.
4. Simmer 15-20 minutes to allow flavors to blend and to soften up cranberries.
5. Add sugar and return to a hard boil for 1 minute.
6. Remove from heat and stir in liquid pectin, blending well. Return to heat and boil hard for 1 minute, stirring constantly.
7. Add jelly to hot jars.
8. Wipe rims with clean, damp towel.
9. Position lids per usual instructions.
10. Process in BWB for 10 minutes.
11. Remove jars and allow to cool.
12. Periodically agiatate jars to distribute solids.

CRANBERRY-HOT PEPPER JELLY from Ellie Topps' book "Small Batch Preserving"

1 large sweet red bell pepper
2 jalapeno peppers, seeded, or other hot pepper
1/4 C. water
3/4 C. cider vinegar
3/4 C. cranberry juice concentrate, thawed
3 C. granulated sugar
1 pouch liquid pectin

Finely chop sweet and hot peppers in a food processor. Place in a small saucepan with water and vinegar. Bring mixture to a boil, cover, and reduce heat. Boil gently for 10 minutes. Strain mixture through a coarse sieve, pressing with back of a spoon to extract as much liquid as possible. Discard solids. Pour liquids through a jelly bag to catch any remaining solids.

Place strained liquid, cranberry concentrate an sugar in a medium stainless steel or enamel saucepan. Bring to a boil over high heat, stirring constantly. Stir in pectin, return to a full boil an boil hard for 1 minute, stirring constantly. Remove from heat, stirring constantly. Remove from heat. Skim foam. Ladle into hot jars and process in BWB for 10 minutes.

Makes about 3 cups.

A variation in the Ellie Topps book is this:

CRANBERRY HOT PEPPER JELLY WITH BALSAMIC VINEGAR: Replace 1/4 C. of the cider vinegar with balsamic vinegar.

Here's another slight variation of ingredients that you can use. Just follow the instructions above, but with these ingredients:

CRANBERRY PEPPER JELLY:

1 1/2 C. cider vinegar
1 1/2 C. 100% unsweetened cranberry juice
1 1/2 C. total of a combination of finely diced jalapeno (or other hot) peper, red (or other color) sweet bell pepper, and red onions
1 1/2 C. cranberries, coarsely chopped
1 box powdered pectin
5 C. sugar

Another great way to use cranberries in the fall/winter is for this cranberry ketchup, which is great on turkey sandwiches (and also is great with beef and pork).

CRANBERRY KETCHUP (make 1.5 pints)

One 3" cinnamon stick, broken into pieces
3 thin slices fresh ginger
1 1/2 lbs. fresh cranberries
1 1/4 C. cider vinegar
1 t. ground cloves
1 t. ground allspice
1/2 t. ground nutmeg
grated zest of 1 large orange
1 1/2 C. firmly packed light brown sugar

Tie the cinnamon pieces and ginger in a spice bag or scrap of cheesecloth. Put this into a nonreactive saucepan with all remaining ingredients except the brown sugar. Bring to a simmer. Simmer until the cranberries soften up--about 20 minutes.

Remove the spice bag and puree the mixture in a food mill or press it through a sieve. Return the puree to the saucepan and add the sugar. Simmer the ketchup until it is thick and glossy, approximately 15 minutes.

Ladle the ketchup into pint or half-pint jars, leaving a 1/4" headspace. Close jars with 2-pc. canning lids and process in a BWB for 10 minutes.

Store in a cool dry place.

Have fun! It is almost cranberry time.

Dawn

It never even dawned on me to make my own tobasco. Duh! Anyone have tried & true recipes for me?

Diane

Diane,

The pepperfool website has the best variety of tabasco-style sauces, but I don't know if any of them are safe for canning, although most of them are safe for up to six months (uncanned) in the refrigerator. I'm not sure if you're looking for a canning recipe or just a fresh-use recipe that can be refrigerated and used for some months.

If you want an extension service-approved recipe, there's one at the website of the National Center for Home Food Preservation, but it has a tomato base.

The way that 'real' tabasco sauce is made by the commercial manufacturer involves 3 years of fermentation in wooden barrels I think, but a lot of home recipes only call for a few weeks to months of fermentation. You'll find several of this type of recipe at pepperfool.com, which I've linked below.

I think if all you put into the mix is peppers and vinegar, there won't be a risk of listeria or botulism because of the pH of the vinegar. Once you start adding other ingredients, the risk goes up. Anything you find at pepperfool is presumably safe since the people there really do know their peppers. I'm linking their pepper sauce section and you can travel around within their website and find their canning section too.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: Pepperfool's Pepper Sauce Index

Diane - I once grew my own tabasco peppers for many years. They are a very pretty plant and beautiful when the peppers mature. Gotta remember to wear gloves when harvesting or working with these!

I've searched my cookbook-case high and low...can't find the recipe I always used. I've also searched the net and found the link below that is closest to what I used. Of course, I made in much larger quantities, bottled and gave for Christmas gifts. The only other things I did different was 1) don't puree the peppers, just chop pretty good (don't leave your nose directly over them!) 2)bring the batch just to a boil over a low-medium heat and remove ASAP. (Again, keep your face AWAY!) I only had to store them about 4 weeks in a cool, dry, dark place before straining and bottling. The recipe and method came from a cookbook I got from the Tabasco Sause people themselves.

Now that I've been reminded of this recipe, I'm probably going to have to make room in my 2010 garden for these peppers!

Paula

Here is a link that might be useful: Tabasco Sauce Recipe

And Dawn - many thanks! I was hoping for one with fresh cranberries!! I found several on the net made with the juices, but I usually buy up several bags of fresh cranberries when they're in season and freeze them as DH loves just about anything made with them. I'll have to share soon a recipe for Holiday Cranberry Stuffed Pork Chops I found several years ago at Southern Living. As you said....it's almost cranberry time!

This is just perfect!!! Next weekend bow season opens and he'll be gone so guess what I'll be making?!?!

Thanks again!
Paula

My husband LOVES habaneros. I plant them for him, and he eats them. LOL

When we have more than he can eat, like this year, he dehydrates them.

At first, the dehydrator has to be outside, cause the smell makes me sneeze, my nose run and my eyes water.

After a day, it goes in the garage, to "really" dry them.

Then, when I am not at home, he turns on the stove exhaust fan, and uses the blender to pulverize them.

They get stored in glass, for his personal use. :)

Moni

Moni,

The habanero fumes today about killed me. I sneeze, cough, have a runny nose, watery eyes, etc. etc. etc. I just hate it. At least it was cool enough for most of the day that I had all the windows open and that helped some, although when I came inside, the fumes still were everywhere. I use my convection oven's dehydrate feature, so I couldn't carry the stove to the garage, but I sure wished I could!

Paula,

You're welcome. I hope cranberries are arriving in the stores. Doesn't it seem about like that time of year?

I meant to post the cranberry salsa recipe too, and now I am too tired to type it. So, I'll link it.

Happy cranberrying!

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: NCHPF's Spicy Cranberry Salsa Recipe

Paula, I also buy cranberries during the holidays and freeze them. They are usually a very good buy after Christmas. I like to slice them in half and then use them in muffins just like you would use blueberries. My DH likes almost everything, but doesn't like cranberry sauce, but he doesn't turn down the muffins. I like everything cranberry.

Thanks so much for the links, Dawn & Paula! I just roasted a couple gallons of chiles tonight but will turn the next batch into tobasco, I believe. I'm a spice nut -- no such thing as too hot. Yum.

Diane

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