The Aji and Jalapeno Flakes are dry – 2010

It turns out that these flakes dried a lot faster then I had expected, go figure. It only took 4 days for them to dry out completely, and that’s only because I gave the peppers an extra day and half in the dryer, since the shredded Jalapenos were very slow to dry.

Looking over the final product, the Aji turned out much more like a flake from using the normal Cuisinart blade and pulsing the motor. Compared to the Jalapeno flakes in which I used the shredding disc on the Cuisinart. Since the Jalapenos seemed to have clumped up badly during the drying process.

But seeing how I had absolutely no information to start with in executing this cooking experiment. I kind of had to make it up as a went along.

I haven’t tasted any of the flakes to see how they turned out, since I was too busy choking on the capsaicin fumes from the basement. So I’ll leave the taste testing for another time.

Drying Jalapeno and Aji Limon into pepper flakes – October 2010

As was briefly mentioned in the end of season garden post. I thought that drying these peppers into flakes would be something that you normally don’t see done with either aji limon or jalapenos peppers. Plus I’m just plain tired of canning this season, so drying these peppers is the lazy way of getting them processed into an end product. Continue reading

Garden Season Over – Killing Frost – October 28, 2010

Oh baby was it cold last night. It ended up dropping down to 28F overnight. So when I got home from work ~6pm, it was a mad rush to pick everything worth picking in the garden before the frost hit. That ended up being about eight tomatoes, ~5 lbs of jalapenos, ~2 lbs of aji limon, and all the rhubarb left in the garden (half a grocery bags worth). And with this mad rush of a harvest, the gardening season is basically over for 2010. The only few surviving items in the garden are the Swiss Chard, the green onions and the sage, but other then that, everything else it dead. Continue reading

Red Jalapeno Hot Sauce – v3 – October 2010

This hot sauce was one of those random ideas that I had, while looking at all the ripened jalapenos in the garden. At first I though about drying the red jalapenos into a red pepper flake, or maybe even smoking them for chipotles. But for some reason, I was more intrigued by the idea of making them into a hot sauce instead. Continue reading

Garden – Late-September 2010

I took these late night shots of the aji limo last night, since for a while there I was worried that they weren’t going to turn yellow. But as you can tell in a couple of the pictures, slowing but surely the aji are going from green to yellow. You can even see a couple of the jalapenos going from green to red.

I had a couple of ideas that I might test out this weekend. But seeing how I only have about 2 or 3 weeks before the first frost hits. I better get cracking on these ideas.

Idea #1, is to take all the red jalapenos, and make a red jalapeno hot sauce, using the latest version of the hot sauce recipe.
Idea #2, would be to make some hot sauce from the green aji.
And finally idea #3, would be to try drying out some of the peppers (aji or jalapeno) for homemade hot pepper flakes.

Jalapeno Hot Sauce – v2 – August 2010

This year I went with a theme for making jalapeno hot sauce of “go big, or go home”, which I think that I more than accomplished.
When I was in Michigan two weekends ago, I had a little bit of free time on Saturday morning before I needed to go to a wedding in Northern Michigan. So I thought that I was swing by the Pontiac Farmers Market with my sister to see if they had any deals on peppers (jalapeno specifically) like they did last year. And once again I wasn’t disappointed. After a quick walk around to gauge the prices for a pint container of jalapenos (they ranged from $0.25 each to $2.00 a pint.) I finally found a vendor at the edge of the open air section of the market that was selling jalapeno’s for $1 per pint. I also noticed that the vendor had about 1/2 a peck’s worth of jalapeno’s in the back, which was in addition to the 3 pints on display. So I inquired how much they wanted for all the jalapeno’s they had, they quoted me $5.00, and I told them “sold”. So for $5.00 I ended up getting about 3.5 lbs of jalapeno’s, which is about $1.43lb, so not too bad price wise. Combine that with the 2.5lbs of El Jefe jalapenos that I picked from my garden, and we are talking about a lot of jalapeno’s. Continue reading

Garden – 07/08/2010

Look at the green garden monster grooooooow. Its been raining on and off for the last couple of weeks. So I really haven’t needed to use the irrigation system that I set-up around the yard. So for now, I’ll call that a bonus. Continue reading

Garden – 06/16/2010 – Setting up the trellis

The tomatoes are starting to get fairly tall and a couple already have blossoms, so I think its about time to setup the trellis system for this year. In years past I’ve left the upper crossbars in place and them tried to space the plants under the crossbars. But at the end of last season I took down all the 1/2″ EMT conduit crossbars, since it really wasn’t the best setup for what I was trying to do. Continue reading

Garden – 06/10/2010

Man oh man, look at all those weeds on the right hand side of the garden. It looks like its finally time to do a little bit of weeding in the garden, even though I haven’t been looking forward to the task. But you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do.

Overall, everything seems to be coming in nicely. The sweet corn and rhubarb are growing like gangbusters. The tomatoes finally seem to be growing well. Maybe in another week or so I’ll prune off all the suckers on the tomatoes, and string them up to the trellis. Continue reading