Tag: jalapenos

Potato Chip Review – Barcel Kettle Style – Jalapeno & A La Diabla

Posted on by AuSable

You know sometimes I roll the dice on a couple of random bags of chips. My last random roll was at my local Mexican bodega on two bags of Barcel brand kettle cooked chips, with the flavors being Jalapeno and the other A La Diabla (red hot chili pepper.) And the results were 50/50, so lets start with the loser, which were the a la diabla, and talk about a strange looking chip. First off they had a strange color, almost like they had been rolled around in cinnamon sugar instead of chili powder. And the taste, it’s like a citric acid overload with a little bit of chili heat. So if you are looking for fake lime taste and some chili heat, on a cinnamon sugar looking chips, then check these out. But personally I’ll take a pass.

So onto the stand out flavor, which were the Jalapeno kettle chips. And talk about a winner in my book. The first thing that got me sucked in was the smell from the bag. Since the chips smelled exactly like a bag of fresh cut jalapenos. But for the smell being so strong the taste was very mild, and that kind of surprised me in a good way. In that the chips had a jalapeno/green pepper kind of flavor, but not very much of that jalapeno heat, so it made them very easy to eat. And because they are kettle style chips, the crunchiness of these chips kind of reminded me of Kruncher’s Jalapano chips. So notch these Jalapeno chips up of the totem pole, because I would definitely like to get them again.

Side notes for both of these chips:

  1. The cartoon pepper on both bags is pretty funny, but it wasn’t enough to sway my decision on not liking the a la diabla flavored chips. I guess better luck next time Barcel.

    2. &

  2. For both of these Barcel brand chips, of all the ingredients listed on the bag, one of the ingredients is MSG, and its listed in bold no less! I really don’t know how to react to this, other then with “oh well”. But I guess if your looking to go out of your way to get some potato chips with MSG, than check out the chips from Barcel.

Garden – 05/31/2010

Posted on by AuSable

As you can probably tell, this is basically just a random dump of pics from the back garden. It seems like most of the plants are doing well. I finally spent some time during Memorial Day weekend to re-do the fence around the garden. Since each morning as I was leaving for work before the fence was fixed, the rabbits were basically using my garden as their personal buffet line. With the worst of the damage being on the tomatoes and swiss chard.

For some strange reason out of the four different beans/peas that I planted in the front right corner. The only seeds that really didn’t germinate at all were the Snow Snap peas from johnny’s, so go figure. But the Xera and Carson both seem to be coming on nice and strong, which is fine with me. Since the only ones that I really care about are the Carson’s, since they are a yellow wax bean. So if I’m able to harvest anything from the other three beans/peas, I’ll consider it a bonus in my book.

Garden – 05/24/2010

Posted on by AuSable

Once again I got myself into another little side project with the garden. This time it has to do with setting up a makeshift irrigation system as cheaply as possible for the garden.

For the last couple of years, I’ve been thinking about how to run a water line over to the garden area as easily as possible. Since dragging around a 100′ hose in the yard is just too cumbersome. And trenching the yard to put the irrigation line underground is just overkill.

Once again, Menards was having a sale on plumbing/irrigation parts, and while I was looking at the sales flyer the idea hit for running the irrigation piping on the top rail of the fence going around the yard, and just securing it to the fence rail with zip ties. So with a plan in place, it was time to pick up all the parts for this project.

It turns out that this whole project only ran me about $50, and that included the crimping tool which was $9.99. Yeah I could have done this even more cheaply and gone with plastic quick connect fittings which would have been ~$6 total instead of $22 total for all the brass fitting. But for me, the extra $16 was worth the splurge.

I guess we’ll see over time how this set-up hold up to the weather.

Seed Starting – 1st flat – Day 13

Posted on by AuSable

Amazing what another five days of growing will do, but it looks like I have a mixed bag of results as far as seeds that ended up germinating.

Success:
Aji Limo
El Jefe
1/2 the Bell Peppers
1/3 the Banana style peppers
1/2 the Sage
1/2 the Basil

Failed:
The other 1/2 or 1/3 of all those listed above
all the parsley
all the cilantro
all the oregeno
all the rosemary

I have to say that I’m not 100% sure that the parsley, cilantro, oregeno, and rosemary have failed. Since all those herbs take anywhere from 14 to 21 days to germinate. So before I toss out all the dirt in those flats, I’ll give them another week or so to do their thing.

Seed Starting – 1st flat – Day 8

Posted on by AuSable

It’s been a little bit tricky, figuring out how to get the temperature just right on the heating pad. Since when I wrapped the whole flat in a movers blanket, the temperature inside the flat shot up to 95F. So I’m going to test out simulating the heat and light cycle of the sun in the growing area. So last night I set up a make shift growing station with a grow light on a couple of copier boxes, with the heating pad and the grow light both plugged into a timer.

The basil ended up sprouting this past weekend, which was a lot quicker than expected. And when I checked the flat this morning, I started to see some activity on the El Jefe jalapenos and the sage. As it currently stands, it seems like the heating mat is cutting down the germination time almost in half, which is pretty amazing. That is of course, with me assuming that the seeds that I saved from last year are still viable. Which is the big question mark for the garden this year.

Seed Starting – 1st flat – 2010 season

Posted on by AuSable

OK, the first flat of seed were sown last night. And here is the breakdown of what is going into the first flat of 72 cells:

9 cells – Aji Limo
9 cells – El Jefe Jalapeno
6 cells – Bell Peppers
3 cells – Jalapeno “M”
3 cells – Banana pepper – green color
3 cells – Banana pepper – yellow color
3 cells – Banana pepper – orange color
6 cells – Sage
6 cells – Basil
6 cells – Parsley
6 cells – Cilantro
6 cells – Oregano
6 cells – Rosemary

Just got my seeds in the mail

Posted on by AuSable

Talk about quick turnaround time. When I got home from work last night, I had a little cardboard box in my mailbox from Johnny’s. So now I’ve got to lay out my seed starting calendar for the next couple of months. The plan so far is to start all the herbs and pepper seeds (jalapeno, aji limo, bell, etc) this week, and then some time next week I’ll start the seeds for all the tomatoes. And then in about two weeks, I’ll start the cucumbers & zucchini inside as well as sowing some of the seeds that need direct sowing (carrots, beets, lettuce, corn, peas, beans, etc.)

When I reviewed all the seeds that I ordered, I noticed an interesting trend with a large portion of the seeds that I ordered. In that maybe two thirds of the seeds that I ordered, are seeds that need to be directly sow into the ground. So really the only seed starting that I’ll need to do this year are for the herbs, peppers, tomatoes, zucchini and cucumbers.

One little tool that I picked up this year, are two seedling heater mats. We’ll see if they are any help in germinating my seeds, since I keep my house right around 63F, so any extra heat to get the seeds off to a strong start is a bonus in my book.

Chili Cook-off recipe – v4

Posted on by AuSable

At work the Friday before the Super Bowl, we ended up having a chili cook-off contest for our department. The entry fee was $5.00 and first prize was $70.00 plus a bunch of other misc stuff (small trophy, pizza party for your team, etc.) There ended up being over 30 entries for the contest, and the types of chili entered by competitors were all over the board (white chili, vegetarian chili, wild game chili, extra tomato chili, etc.) After a few weeks of back and forth conversations with JRR to hash out a recipe, here was the chili that I entered into the contest. This recipe didn’t make the top three (and they only listed the top three finishers.) But as the VP that sits next to me kidded, that maybe I got 4th place. So enjoy this recipe for 4th Place Chili: Continue reading →

Jalapeno Hot Sauce – v1 – Oct 2009

Posted on by AuSable

I really like the jalapeno version of McIlhenny Tabasco sauce, more so then the original version. My favorite use of Green Tabasco is on scrambled eggs (now surpassing ketchup.) But it is also great as a condiment on a wide spectrum of Mexican inspired dishes, as you would expect it to be. But being the mad cooking scientist that I am, I’ve been tossing around the idea of trying to make my own version of that oh so delicious green hot sauce. With a tip of the hat to JRR for sending me the link to this hot sauce recipe from Tyler Florence over at Food Network, I was off and running. Here is my adaptation of Tyler’s recipe: Continue reading →

Canning a batch of Pickled Jalapenos – v2 – Oct 2009

Posted on by AuSable

After I made the first batch of jalapeno rings, I started to think that I might want to try and make the jalapeno rings a totally different way. In case I run into any issues with the first batch (such as the rings being too salty). Don’t ask me how, but somehow I ended up on the website for  Backwoods Home Magazine, and they had an article about canning peaches. Well within that page they had a link to “The USDA Complete Guide to Home Canning” on the Penn State University web site. Continue reading →