Just finished putting up chile for the year this past weekend. I'm lucky, since Hatch chile is a staple at our house. Here is a side dish that my family loves. Calabacitas 2 cups whole corn 4 Tbs. oil 1/2 chopped onion 2 cups chopped chile 1 glove minced garlic 4 med. zuchinni squash - diced 1 tsp. salt 1/4 tsp. pepper 1/2 cup water 3/4 cup jack cheese Cook corn in oil - about 2 minutes. Add onion, chile & garlic. Cook until onion in transparent. Add squash, salt, pepper, & water - cook about 15 minutes or until tender. Top with cheese. Here is a picture of one batch of chile Then dinner that night Nothing better than having a freezer full of chile. Donna

Thank you all for the suggestions and support. The event was fun and though we didn't win, it was a learning experience. bob_cville Thank you for the recipe. It gave me starting point and I used a lot of your ideas. suzyqtexas I used your dried mushrooms idea. LKZZ I used your ideas for the cocoa powder, beef base and Rotel tomatoes. We made about 12 gallons of chili and had about 3 cups left at the end of the day. There were about 1,500 paying tasters plus all the teams and volunteers. The host guesstimated just under 2,000 for a final head count. We set up at 6:30 AM and started dicing, slicing,cooking, etc. at 8AM, by 10AM everything was together and simmering. The gates opened at 12 noon and we finished serving at 4PM. A few things I would do differently next time: * I will not use maple flavored bacon. I will use a basic applewood or hickory next time. The maple flavor was too much. * Cut back on the cocoa powder. I only used about 1/4 cup but we had several people pick right up on the cocoa flavor. * Add more chili peppers. We used Chipotle's in Adobo, dried Ancho, Chipotle, Guajillo, and Cascabel chili peppers. The flavor was great but I seeded all the dried peppers before grinding them and there was not enough zing to the chili. * Not use Baked Kidney beans. The molasses added too much sweetness. (This is a family thing so I stuck with it. Though I didn't use too many baked beans, ours was the only sweet chili so the molasses really stood out when compared to the other entries.) I did use dried Wood Ear and Shitake mushrooms which I ground into a powder and used tomato powder which really rounded out the flavor. One thing I did not take into consideration was that tasters would be doing a direct comparison. The other 14 entries were similar in flavor profile. Ours was very different. Lastly I definitely will get one 80 qt. SS pot for next year. My 60 qt. aluminum pots went MIA. I think I loaned them out and never got them back. I used 30 qt and 40 qt. pots both aluminum. Using 2 different size pots was challenging and I do not like using aluminum especially with tomatoes. Overall our chili was the children's favorite because it was milder than the rest and had a sweetness to it. Once I take inventory and find my notes, I'll post the final recipe. Again, thank you to everyone for your help.

I was at my SIL's family's farm on chicken day and was offered the job of plucking or gutting. I chose plucking. ugh. This is why we don't keep chickens. We've spent the last three weekends cleaning out the garden. DH put in a trickle tape system and for some idiotic reason decided since it only trickles, he should water every day. I wondered why I was fighting moss... Anyway, we wound up with giant potatoes and carrots, blown cabbage, huge hot peppers that weren't hot and a bazillion tomatoes. I canned salsa (I had to buy some hot jals), chopped tomatoes with peppers, marinated peppers, and froze roasted tomatoes and peppers for pasta sauce and a huge batch of tomato, pepper and eggplant ragu w/ Italian sausage. We ran a lot of the tomatoes through the Victorio and I cooked some of them down to paste and dehydrated in 1 tbsp. plops. Fortunately, it's been cool enough to keep my "smooth top" range going. I'm down to a half-dozen tomatoes and a batch of seafood cocktail sauce that needs to be processed. This is from last Sunday: plain sauce, tomatoes and peppers, chipotle ketchup, chili sauce and a batch of marinara. There were a couple of trays of vegies for tomato garlic soup in the oven also. I am sick of tomatoes...

Bon, I am glad you found the article helpful. The amount of pepper varieties available is mind-boggling and you can have fun growing new ones every year for the rest of your life if you want. There's so many that you'll never run out of new ones to try. In fact, there are 5 new hybrid pepper varieties among the 2015 All-American Selections national winners. I've never seen 5 different varieties of any one vegetable win in the same year. With almost all peppers, I prefer to let them stay on the plants until they reach their mature color, but I'll harvest bell peppers in the green stage and use them in Annie's Salsa if the tomatoes, garlic, onions, cilantro and jalapenos are ready to use.....I'm not going to hold up the whole canning process waiting for the bell peppers to go from green to red, orange or yellow. I just like the richer, fuller flavor of colored peppers. I suspect it is the commercial growers/grocery industry that has convinced us all to eat our bell (and other) peppers green---because green peppers have a longer shelf life. If growers wait and harvest the peppers at their mature color, the shelf life is much shorter. Carol, We've had that happen before, even when we've warned someone "don't take a bite of that one, it is really hot". They always think "how hot can it be" and then they find out exactly how hot. Some years I have grown the regular orange Habanero pepper as well as NuMex Suave Orange Habanero, which was bred to eliminate almost all the heat. (I think it is around 300-500 Scoville Heat Units.) To someone who doesn't raise these peppers, these two can be hard to tell apart, although the Suave Orange is more of a yellowish-orange than the regular orange Habanero. I always harvest them separately, placing them in plastic containers in the garden that are clearly labeled at the moment of harvest, and I store them in clearly-labeled zip lock bags, and still there will be some point at which a person mistakes the hot one for the low-heat one and lives to regret it Carol, Talking about peppers made me crave poppers too. I've made three batches since this thread began. Every year I am getting better yields than before with poblanos, which is interesting because for so very long they just would not produce much here. They have produced well since either 2011 or 2012. I'm growing a new one this year called Mosquetero. They are supposed to grow to 6" long x 3" wide and the plants are supposed to be heavy producers. I guess I'll find out if those things are true. Amy, I love finding varieties that I remember my dad, grandfather or one of my uncles growing. My dad told me once that "you can't find Amish Moon and Stars watermelon any more", and that was long before I found and started growing heirloom varieties, so I was thrilled when I found it and was able to grow it. I also grow at least one Big Boy tomato plant every year because he always grew it. He loved Big Boy and often about half the tomato plants in his garden would be Big Boy. I like having it in the garden because it reminds me of him. I generally dry some of each type of hot pepper that I make and make my own flakes for use in cooking. When properly dehydated, they store forever, and I can choose which kind of flakes I want to use while cooking. There are lots of pepper plants that I think are worthy of growing as ornamentals whether a person likes to eat the peppers or not. The black and purple ones are my favorite ornamental types, mainly because they contrast pleasantly with the edible ones I'm growing that mature to yellow, red or orange. . I grow Black Pearl and Purple Splash every year, whether I intend to or not. One year I didn't sow seeds of either one, but got some volunteers from the previous year. I've also grown tons of the NuMex ones over the years, like NuMex Sunrise, NuMex Sunset, 6-4, Sandia, Suave Red, Suave Orange, etc. The last 3 or 4 years I've really had to rein in my desire to grow 2 or 3 dozen pepper varieties because I was planting conservatively in the face of anticipated drought. This year, since we are having some winter rain for a change, I'm going to pretend we won't have drought this spring and summer (hey, it could happen!) and I'm going to plant a lot more different kinds of peppers. I need to make some Tabasco sauce and other things that I don't make every single year. Y'all, the NMSU Chile Pepper Institute sells the seeds of lots of the varieties developed there at the university as well as the seeds of some varieties they didn't develop. They include shipping and handling in the price per pack, so keep that in mind when you see their prices. I"ll link its website below. Here is a link that might be useful: Seeds @ NMSU Chile Pepper Institute