Recipe: Hot Pepper Jelly

Last night, I made a small batch of blackberry jelly with the last of the harvest. Half a pint of blackberries, plus almost a cup of sugar, plus a little splash of water was enough, after a 10 minute boil to make it gel when it cooled without using any pectin. I got about a teacup's worth of jelly after running it through a fine strainer. Dee-lish on Sally Lunn or rye bread.

We have lots of peppers growing in our vegetable garden -- cayennes and sweet banana peppers -- so today I decided to try my hand at making hot pepper jelly. It worked out just fine.

Yield: 3 cups
Time: 10 minutes cooking; 10 minutes to can

Ingredients:

• 1/8 cup of finely minced fresh hot peppers (I used cayenne, but jalapeno or serrano would work as well)
• 3/8 cup of finely minced fresh sweet pepper (I used banana, but bell is fine, too)
• 3/4 cup of white or cider vinegar
• 3 cups of sugar
• 1 packet (1.75 oz.) of pectin
• 1-2 drops of green food coloring

Method:

1. sterilize your mason jars, and have at the ready ring tops (used or new) and unused lids
2. mix all the ingredients in a pot and bring them to a boil
3. whisk in the pectin and food coloring, let it go for another minute or so, then turn off the heat
4. pour into your mason jars, place the lids on, and screw down the ring tops fairly loosely
5. boil the jars, submerged, for 8-10 minutes, and remove them to cool (when the lids "pop," screw the ring tops down tightly)
   

Notes: The food coloring really is optional, and you could use red if you prefer. It's just that without it, it sort of looks like bits of pepper in light corn syrup. I used a mix of both red and green cayennes and yellow and orange banana peppers, simply because that's what I happened to have on hand. The minced pepper tends to float in the jars, so you may want to flip the mason jars upside down, then right side up, every 15 minutes or so as the jelly cools, just to get them distributed a bit better throughout the jars.

Tomatoes!

My vegetable garden has produced a fair amount of veggies, so far -- tomatoes, peppers, green beans, cucumbers, eggplants, and squash. The corn is coming along nicely, as are the canteloupes, but they're not ready to pick.

It's green bean and tomato season. Good thing I love green beans, because I can pick a pint of Kentucky Wonder pole beans every morning, and eat them every night without getting sick of them.

The yellow banana peppers are nice (perhaps a little milder than bell peppers, although similar in taste), but honestly, I prefer the cayennes. Mince one of those, and toss it into dinner, seeds, pith and all, and it's got just the right amount of mouth-numbing heat, without killing the taste of the rest of the food.

We have seven different varieties of tomatoes: cherry, Big Boy, some sort of yellow one that's proving to be really prolific, Bush Early Girl, Bush Goliath, Mr. Stripey (an heirloom), and something that was labeled as Roma, but obviously isn't, given the size and shape of the fruit it produces.

We have a half dozen full-sized tomatoes waiting to be eaten, but tonight's dinner features a good pint's worth of cherry tomatoes from my garden, simply sauteed in 1.5 Tbs. of olive oil, with nothing more than chopped fresh oregano and basil, also from my garden, plus a couple of cloves of minced garlic, salt, and freshly ground Tellicherry pepper. My whole house smells phenomenal.

It'll only be a side dish, but during the past couple of weeks, dinner has consisted of mostly two or three vegetarian side dishes. Neither of us are vegetarians, but we can go for a few days without eating animal flesh when the veggies taste this good!