A Chipotle is Just a Smoke-Dried Jalapeño

A chipotle (chi-POAT-lay) is a smoke-dried chile pepper. Many chiles can be turned into chipotles, with jalapeño the most recognizable here in the U.S. If you're growing, or have access to, jalapeño peppers, it's easy to make a chile smoker and with that, your own chipotles to add flavor to soups or beans, grind into powder, make enchilada sauce, or can en adobo. Start with ripe jalapeno peppers, ideally those that have turned completely red. If all you have access to are green jalapeños, no problem.

Peppers, like tomatoes, will continue to ripen after they're picked if left unrefrigerated. In the fall, when frost threatens, I pick then pile my peppers in a bowl and let them set out on the counter for a couple of weeks. They can set for quite a while, but try to process jalapeños before the stem starts to separate from the body of the chile. Some peppers with thinner walls will continue to ripen and then dry, but jalapeños are too fleshy - they tend to rot before they'll dry. Smoking them is one way to preserve them - canning them as nacho slices, freezing them whole, sliced, or stuffed with a cream cheese mixture to turn into poppers, or whipping up a batch of jalapeno hot sauce, or jelly are other options.

But I digress. We're supposed to be making a smoker to turn jalapeños into chipotles. Commercial smokers, that have been previously used for meat can give a greasy, and later rancid, taste to the chiles, so it's best to put together something just for the chipotles. The main thing to remember is that you don't want to cook the jalapeños, but rather let the smoke waft away the moisture in the chiles as it also infuses them with flavor.

The best way to do that is to make a separate firebox, and then connect it to your smoking box with a piece of pipe. Of course, the firebox portion has to be able to withstand fire, so I use some cinder blocks and a piece of steel pipe. I used some crumpled foil to fill in the areas between round pipe and square blocks, but it doesn't have to be perfectly airtight. The smoker section, on the other hand, only has to hold the chiles suspended in the smoke while it acts as an offset chimney, so a cardboard box works fine. In the past, I've found taller boxes (that held a windshield, or a washer) but this time I'd just picked up a couple of smaller ones. They were two different diameters though, and instead of trying to fit them together, I found a piece of roof vent flashing, set that on the bigger box, then the smaller box, and taped the flaps of the bottom box to the upper box.

Next, you need some way to suspend the peppers in the rising smoke. A pan poked full of holes could work, but isn't ideal - the peppers would tend to steam in their juices more than dry. In the past, I've strung the peppers on lengths of string, and hung that draped across dowels poked through the box. That's not too bad, depending on how you want to use your chipotles. If you're just dropping them whole into a pot of soup, it's ok, but if you're planning on grinding some into powder or canning some in adobo sauce the string can be difficult to deal with. A wire basket or a rack that won't allow the chiles to drop through is best. I bent a piece of hardware cloth into a basket, suspending it on the (cut-down) cardboard divider inside the box plus a couple pieces of coat hangers stuck through the box.

The best woods to use for smoking the chiles are from fruits or nut trees. If that's not possible, hardwoods are the next best. You just don't want to use pine, mesquite, or other resinous woods. I always save the prunings from my fruit trees, so I'm always ready when getting ready to start smoking. The night before, I soaked half the wood pieces so they'll burn slower and cooler.

It's always best to be prepared when playing with fire, so I pulled the hose over, on at the faucet and closed off with a twist valve. Aries also brought the fire extinguisher out of the garage, just in case. I started a fire in my firebox, and while I waited for it to get going, I pulled the stems off the jalapenos and loaded up the basket. I used all my red ones, those partially changed, and then some of the green ones with white corking (desirable in chipotles - don't ask me why). If I've grown paprika or habanero peppers, I'll usually smoke-dry some of them too, to grind into powders.

Once I had a nice little bed of hot coals in the firebox, I added a couple handfuls of soaked wood and then put a piece of metal over the top, held down with a couple smaller bricks. I sat out to watch for a while, just to make sure everything was holding together ok. Every hour or two, I'd add more wood, and turned the chiles a couple of times.

Low and slow is the best way to make chipotles - both flavorful and ones that will last in storage. It's better to stretch it out over a couple of days than to try and hurry up the process with more heat. I smoked my chiles all day, but rain was on the way. I just pulled the cardboard boxes away from the pipe and set them in the garage for the next day and a half. The photo above is after another afternoon of smoking, and I have them going again this afternoon. If you're in a hurry, the jalapenos will dry faster if cut in half and seeds removed. You can also dry them in a dehydrator or your oven until wrinkled but not stiff, and then smoke them (doing it in reverse will also work, but your house will smell like smoke for days). Finished chipotles are hard, lightweight, and dark brown in color. Ones that are still leathery won't store as long. Once the chipotles are dried, store them in jars with a rubbery seal or in an airtight plastic bag.

Umm - the aroma just from opening up my chipotle jar to take this photo made my mouth start to water. To use, drop one into a pot of beans or soup, and remove after cooking. If you want to grind them into powder, they might need to be dried further, until they can be broken in half. I use some of mine to make a big batch of enchilada sauce (pressure-canned) every couple of years. Or new last year, a batch of chipotles en adobo - re-hydrated chipotles pickled in a tomato-based sauce (double-yum! - recipe to be posted soon).

Sunshine Hot Sauce

I plant one Habanero chile plant each summer. The peppers are so hot that I don't need very many - enough for a batch of hot sauce, a few more to freeze, and then a few to hang in a little ristra to dry, to grind into powder. I've learned that even those I have to harvest green, if full-size, can be left out on the counter in a bowl and will ripen to orange.

This past summer my one plant did really well, for my climate, anyway. My hot sauce recipe makes 1 quart but this year I had enough Habaneros for all my own uses plus a second quart of sauce. I just reuse the same bottles for my own hot sauce, but needed to find some way to package that second quart to give away as Christmas gifts. I found a bottle company on-line here, and ordered a case of 12 5-ounce sauce bottles plus the drip shaker inserts, tax and delivery, for $20.

I sterilized and filled 6 bottles, storing the other half-case for the next time I get a bumper crop. Since the sauce is such a pretty yellow-orange color, I decided to call it Sunshine Hot Sauce (not quite as hot as the sun, but close), and created a label to fit on 2" x 4" shipping labels. The labels were a little taller than the flat side of the bottles, so they're pleated a bit on the curves top and bottom, but I like the way they look. In fact, a couple of the people I've given them to are amazed when they realize that it's something I made myself, instead of a professional company product.

I Miss the Ping!

Canning jars used to seal with a clear, ringing, PING! It was almost bell-like, and loud. I could hear it throughout the entire house. I'd take a load of jars out of the canner, and could count them off as each sealed, no matter what room I was in.

I still use the narrow-mouth, two-part lids-with-a sealing ring I always have, the same jars, the same headspace. But now, whether due to probably a cost-cutting change to the metal or the shape of the sealing "dimple", there is no more "ping". Jars now seal with an almost inaudible "tap" or small "thunk" sound. I sometimes miss it even when I'm right there in the kitchen. I'll look over at the jars, and the dimple is pulled down, but I never even heard half of them. I miss that PING! It was one of my favorite sounds.

I canned a last batch of tomato sauce today. I harvested all my green tomatoes last month, just before a killing freeze, and laid them out on a table across the guest room bed to ripen. Usually, my final tomato canning is done by mid-October. But this year, the last harvest was quite late, with our mellow autumn, and the house is much cooler this time of year. Thus, the last canner load now, in late November. I'm just glad to get anything at all, with as poor a gardening year as the past one was.

With company arriving later this week, it was time to get that room switched over to guest room status. I held out a couple of nice, big red tomatoes for fresh eating this week. Those still green or orange I loaded onto a tray to put down in the cellar. Those I'll bring up, a couple at a time, to ripen in the warmer kitchen throughout the winter. The taste certainly can't compare to vine-ripened summer tomatoes, but is better than the ones I refuse to buy in the grocery store. The rest of the tomatoes warmed up the house as they cooked down into sauce today - nine pints in the canner, plus two more in the freezer.

Canning Tomatillo Salsa

I've been trying to get the last of the garden harvest out of the guest room before family get here for Thanksgiving. I can't believe it's only a little over a week away! I still have tomatoes covering one table - most of them are finally getting red enough to process, so a big batch of tomato sauce is on the agenda for sometime this week. I went through what onions I was able to harvest, separating out the ones that didn't bulb up and the ones with thick necks (because they won't last in storage), and am using those up first.

The project for today was processing the last of the tomatillos, along with homegrown onions, garlic, and chiles (processed and frozen earlier this season), into green salsa. Over time, and through experimentation, I've learned what things will hold without refrigeration or processing until I can get around to doing something with them for longer storage. Tomatillos are one of the best for that - picked when fruit is full-sized and the husks still green, and just piled in a bowl, they'll easily hold for a couple of months on the counter or in the pantry.

I'd already canned 9 pints, a full canner load, of plain tomatillos earlier this summer. And a long, mellow fall allowed me to get a second flush of chiles. My tomatoes didn't do very well this year, so what ones I have are destined for tomato sauce and jars of whole tomatoes; no tomato salsa this year. I still have two jars of roasted tomato salsa from last year, a few more of peach salsa, plus some of last year's hot sauces, but we really like salsa for everything from chip dip to tacos to spicing up everyday meals. So I started looking for a tomatillo salsa recipe.

I thought I'd try this one, from the National Center for Home Food Preservation, one of my go-to reference sites for canning info. Since I now use my own blog as recipe storage (after losing some online recipes, I just had bookmarked, when the sites disappeared), I'm re-posting a quick version here. Go to the original site if you're new to canning and you need more instructions.

Tomatillo Salsa (about 5 pints)

5 cups chopped tomatillos
4 cups chopped onions
1½ cups chopped chiles - roasted, peeled and seeded
½ cup minced jalapenos - seeds and ribs removed
1 cup lemon or lime juice
6 cloves garlic, minced
1 tablespoon cumin
3 tablespoons dried oregano
1 tablespoon canning salt
1 teaspoon pepper

Simmer 20 minutes; ½" headspace; 20 minutes boiling water bath (for my 5,000 ft altitude)

I had enough tomatillos to make a double batch, ending up with 8½ pints. Since I don't have a food processor, I just hand-chopped everything. I'm thinking maybe next time, I'll try running the tomatillos and onions though my old food grinder instead.

Janan's Jalapeno Jelly

I didn't get many jalapeno peppers this year. Summer was late, and then it never did get really hot this year (plus, our visiting Bambi reached his nose down inside the plant cages and ate the tops of the plants, spitting out deer-slobbered chewed peppers, until we finally got a tall enough fence up). But I did get a small bowlful, so started thinking about what to do with them.

Last year, I planted extra jalapenos, and then smoke-dried them into chipotles (tutorial here), enough to last for 3-4 years. I still have a couple jars of nacho slices, and besides, there weren't enough this year to bother getting out the pressure canner. I've run out of jalapeno hot sauce, but like my cayenne and habanero/orange hot sauces better anyway.

And then, my friend Janan in Tennessee posted a beautifully staged photo of a cracker with a smear of cream cheese, topped with a dollop of jalapeno jelly, on her FaceBook page. Bingo! It looked sooo good, I asked for her recipe. She was kind enough to send it to me. And when it turned out as good as it looked, I asked if I could put it on my blog. "Go ahead," she said, "make me famous."


Janan's Jalapeno Jelly

2½ cups roughly chopped peppers (I use approx. 20 smaller jalapenos = 1½ c. jalapenos, + 1 c. bell peppers)
2 cups apple cider vinegar (divided)
7 cups sugar
2 packets liquid pectin
optional - a couple of drops green food coloring

WEARING GLOVES! (I've been working my way through a box of latex surgical gloves for the past six years, and probably still have enough to last me a couple more years - definitely a worthwhile investment), remove stems, seeds, and inside ribs from jalapenos. In a blender, liquefy peppers with one cup vinegar. Combine with sugar and remaining cup of vinegar. Heat to boiling, then continue to boil for 10 minutes. Add pectin and, stirring constantly, continue to boil one minute more. Remove from heat, and stir in food coloring if using. Fill hot, sterilized jars to 1/4" headspace, seal, and process in a hot water bath 10 minutes (I did mine 15 minutes, since I'm at 5,000 feet altitude).

Janan says this recipe makes 10 half-pints, but I average six to seven. Even so, mine does have the perfect balance of heat and sweet, and the jelly, while firm enough to hold its shape in the jar, is still "spreadable" too. My jalapenos averaged a little over 2", which I figured were on the small side - Janan said hers were more like 4 inches. I've since edited the recipe include my notes over the years.

In the photo above, the jelly is on the right (I did add the food coloring), and then a few jars of tomatillos on the left. There's more information about growing and canning tomatillos here, in my post on the Simple Green Frugal Co-op blog.

Sour Pickle Experiment

When I was a kid, I asked Santa for a ChemLab one Christmas - back then, a toy laboratory in a tri-fold tin box. The best part, for me, was the microscope. But playing with chemical mixing and reactions was fun too. I still like experimenting with chemical reactions. Only nowadays, I have a whole kitchen for my laboratory (plus now, my results are edible - well, most of the time, anyway).

The end of August this year, I had a glut of cucumbers. For some reason, they did really well (especially the hybrid Sugar Crunch - earliest, prolific, and yummy; next best were from my saved Lemon Cucumber seeds - though later to start setting fruit, they're amazingly prolific, and the last ones picked will keep a few more weeks in a bowl on the counter, on into the fall; not so good - an open-pollinated one, Long Green). I feast on fresh cukes when I've got them, and quite often have planted enough to put up as well. Only thing is - Aries doesn't like pickles, so I'm the only one eating them. I already have enough sweet relish, dill chips, sweet pickles, and bread & butter pickles. I started researching other options.

My dill chips, from my Aunt Lillian's recipe, are tasty, but not crunchy enough. Pickles can add such a nice crunch to a sandwich. Hmmm - maybe pickling them whole would be better. These were pretty good-sized cukes though - two, maybe three, to a quart jar. Then, I started looking into fermenting instead of pickling. Ooo, something new to experiment with. I like sauerkraut; I've got a nice glass crock (extra cool for playing scientist, for observing those chemical changes).

I thought it especially interesting reading about the need to cut the merest little slice off the blossom end of the cucumbers. The blossom end produces an enzyme that hastens ripening of the fruit, and if left intact can contribute to softness in pickles. News to me - I'll definitely have to experiment more with that when I next make any other kind of pickles. Ideally, leaving a bit of the stem attached to the other end also makes for a better pickle.

Especially in the older recipes, layering grape leaves in with the cucumbers was said to contribute to crunchiness in the end product. I just happen to have a couple of organically-grown grapevines, so I picked and washed a bunch of palm-sized leaves. Everything ready, I made a layer of grape leaves, shiny-side up, on the bottom of the crock, then stacked in the whole cucumbers with fresh dill, garlic, and a couple of dried hot peppers. I topped the stack with more grape leaves and a ceramic plate, poured in the lightly salted (with only a little bit of vinegar) brine, and then left it to start fermenting (the recipe I used here).

After a couple of weeks, it was smelling pretty good. The fresh cukes were still rolling in, so I pulled out the plate and top layer of grape leaves, added another layer plus more brine, and replaced the leaves and plate to let it go on fermenting.

And now, it's five weeks later. About every third or fourth day, I use a stainless steel spoon to skim the thin layer of whitish scum off the top of the water. It stills smells yummy. Inside the crock, things are really interesting. The cucumbers have lost their shiny green color, and are starting to take on a more translucent look. At first glance, it looks like a white mold is forming on the top sides of everything.

But disturb the crock and it turns into a 20-pound snow globe. The white stuff swirls around, almost flaky in appearance - floating about, turning the brine milky, and then slowly settling again.

My research said fermentation takes about 4 weeks in a 70-degree environment - our average countertop temperature this time of year. When finished the pickles should have a uniformly translucent appearance, and a pleasantly sour taste. I cut one open, and there are just little bits of still-whitish flesh. It was sooooo good! I left it out on the cutting board this afternoon, and have already eaten half of it - one slice at a time.

A lot of the sources say the finished pickles will keep 4-6 months refrigerated, but should be heat-processed for longer storage. But they also say that if you maintain at least a couple inches of brine above the pickles, and skim the top scum off regularly, they'll keep fermenting, getting sourer and sourer. Fermentation slows down too, the lower the temperature. I don't want to cook the pickles (possibly lessening crunchiness), and don't have much refrigerator space, so my plan is to try keeping them in the crock through the winter. I pulled everything out of the crock, and cleaned and re-sterilized it. I filled a quart jar with a couple of the smaller pickles, to keep on the fast-track ferment here on the kitchen counter. I then re-packed the rest of the pickles back into the crock, mixing up a bit more of the brine to top it off.

We've been opening up the cellar nights now - the inside temperature is now down in the low 60's. I'm going to move the pickle crock down there, and keep a close eye on the scum situation (if left too long, mold then forms too - ruining the pickles and possibly poisoning me). But I'm thinking, the cellar temperature will continue to drop, fermentation will slow down, and I can safely eat yummy sour pickles all winter (or until they're all gone, anyway). Worst case scenario, they'll end up in the refrigerator by February.

**Edit added six months later: Now, towards the end of March, the pickles are still doing fine down in the cellar, where temps are still in the low 40'sF. They pickled all the way through, but since then I haven't noticed that they've gotten any sour-er.

Every week to 10 days an almost gel-like layer of scum forms on the top, occasionally with a couple specks of blue-topped white mold on top of that. It's easy enough to just pinch that layer, pull it out, and toss it.

The pickles are still submerged a couple of inches below the surface, beneath the heavy china plate. When I want another pickle, I'll fish one out, redistribute those left, and replace the plate. Inside the house, I have a quart jar of brine in the refrigerator, where I keep the current pickle, cutting slices off as needed. No scum forms on the jar in the refrigerator.

A lucky bonus came from using the grape leaves. I don't know if they made the pickles any crisper, but they pickled along with the cucumbers. I'll usually eat one or two standing right there in the cellar. I have some recipes for making dolmas, grape leaves stuffed with a rice filling, and might try that if I have any left when it's time to empty the crock to move what's left to the refrigerator as the cellar warms up. They're good enough that I think I'll add even more grape leaves to next year's batch.

A Bit More Canning

It seemed like this year's Bosc pears all ripened overnight, down in the cellar. One day a few were just starting to change color, by the next some were only fit for the chickens. So I had to do something to process the rest of them quick. I also had some non-storage apples starting to soften, a dehydrator tray full of the last of the grapes that hadn't dried enough to store, and the last of the Asian pears still in the refrigerator crisper. Why not just mix everything together?

So I started looking for Pear/Apple Mincemeatless recipes. Most used way more sugar than I wanted. I ended up adapting this one. As it was cooking, with the orange peel and the spices, it made the whole house smell wonderful. I ended up with six quarts, plus three more cups in the refrigerator. I'm thinking I'll add some chopped nuts when I go to make a jarful into a pie.

As long as I had the grinder out, I figured I might as well get a start on my Thanksgiving dinner preparations. I made up a batch of my favorite uncooked cranberry relish - grinding together a bag of cranberries, an orange, peel and all, and a handful of walnuts, then stirring in 3/4 cup of sugar.

The grinder I found in a rental house years ago, forgotten in a high cupboard. It leaks, so I have to put a bowl on a stool underneath when I use it. When Aries built the kitchen (before I knew him), he made a pull-out wooden shelf under part of the counter. It was supposed to be a pastry board, but I have a huge piece of recycled bowling alley for a cutting board that works even better for pastry. I use the shelf for attaching the grinder (and the apple peeler) so I don't dent my countertops or kitchen table. However, if I were around when he was building the kitchen, I would have had him put the shelf on the other side of the sink. Where it is, it's too close to the stove to attach those old right-handed appliances on the other side, where they'd be easier to use. The shelf does pull out enough, though, that I can still turn the handle. It's a bit awkward, but it works.

Roasted Tomato Salsa

I can finally get to lots of household tasks that have been waiting for me around here. Sitting on a couple of trays in my spare bedroom, the rest of the tomatoes I picked green in early October had ripened. Plus, I needed to do something with the last of the fresh peppers in the refrigerator. I'd already put up 16 pints of tomato sauce earlier, so decided a batch of salsa sounded good.

My salsa canning recipe is ok, but could be better. Throwback at Trapper Creek had written about roasting her tomatoes for salsa on a post at the Simple Green Frugal Co-op blog a while back, and that sounded good. So I used her recipe, adapting it to what I had on hand.

I grow paste tomatoes for canning, so I just cored them and piled them into a roasting pan to roast more or less whole. After slipping the skins, I had 16 cups of tomatoes, so I increased all the ingredients by half again. I like a chunky salsa, so I just snipped the tomatoes into pieces with kitchen shears right there in the measuring bowl. I thought roasting the peppers would be good too, so I took the last of my fresh green bell peppers and a bunch of the fresh green jalapenos out to the barbecue grill. After they were roasted, sweated, peeled, and chopped, I added a few frozen chile "packets" until I had enough. I used my cayenne pepper hot sauce instead of Tabasco, and added a teaspoon of lime juice to each pint before filling the jars (to make it a bit more acidic, just in case roasting the peppers made more of them fit into the measuring cup). I put up 12 pints, with just a little bit left over for the refrigerator. So now, I'll have to see what Aries thinks.

Peach Salsa

I had a day to myself with no outside commitments today. A couple of weeks ago, I'd changed my decor over to fall colors (my favorites), and have been slowly getting the summer stuff cleaned and stored away. The table linens and kitchen items I can wash at home, but the summer bed quilts are too big for my washing machine. It was going to be a beautiful warm day with little wind, so the first thing I did was gather up the quilts and blankets (and our sleeping bags too - after camping for a week at Tahoe I might as well) and headed to the other end of town to a laundromat that has big 50-pound front-loading washers.

The sleeping bags I dried there for a while - they fluff up better when tumble-dried. The attendant even offered me six tennis balls to put in with them - soaking up a bit more moisture, and pummeling the bag fillings to fluff them up even more. The blankets and quilts are all cotton, so I brought them home damp to dry out on the clothesline. I love the smell of sun-dried cotton bedding, and I'd rather not beat up my quilts any more than necessary.

So, once home and with everything hung outside to dry, it was time to finish up processing peaches and chiles. A few days ago, I'd had time to peel and chop the peaches. I've measured 2-pint increments in my enameled pot, and notched an old wooden spoon handle - fifteen pounds of peaches ended up being a little over 11 pints. I'd sprinkled the top layer with lime juice and put the whole thing into the refrigerator until I had time to make a batch of salsa. I'm probably not going to have enough tomatoes to make a tomato salsa this year - all I have will be canned as whole tomatoes and tomato sauce. So this peach salsa will be my only salsa.

I put the peaches on to start cooking them down a bit (using a flame-tamer over my gas burner), and 9 pint jars into a canner-ful of water to start heating up to sterilize. I checked the freezer - might as well clean out all peppers left from last year. I had a few chiles left, plus a couple of roasted and peeled bell peppers and some sliced jalapenos. Thawed and minced up, they made up almost a cup, so I'd only need another cup for the salsa. The rest of the chiles from this year's harvest could go into the freezer.

The chiles I'd roasted a couple of days ago had been stored in the bag in the refrigerator, so I put on some (latex surgical) gloves and started on them. The big straight chiles are easiest to clean. Each one I folded into a little "packet" and put on a cookie sheet to freeze. Afterwards, dumped into a freezer bag, it's easy to grab however much I want at a time. The littler chiles, and the curved ones that got mashed and broken while roasting, I added to the measuring cup to use right away.

Peach (or Nectarine) Salsa (makes 8-9 pints)
12 - 15 pounds peaches (or nectarines), peeled and chopped
2 cups onions, finely diced (I used red onions, for the color)
2 cups chiles or peppers, roasted, peeled and chopped, or seeded and minced if fresh
2 tablespoons minced fresh garlic
2 bunches cilantro, minced (makes about 1 cup)
2 tablespoons non-iodized salt
2 tablespoons sugar (optional, to taste)
up to 1 tablespoon hot pepper powder (optional, to taste)

lime juice

Simmer peaches, cooking down to about 9 pints. Add rest of ingredients, except for lime juice. Cook down to about 9 pints.

Put 1 tablespoon lime juice in each sterilized pint jar. Fill jars, to 1/4" headspace, seal. Process in boiling water bath 30 minutes (that's for my Carson City altitude, at 5,000 feet; process for 20 minutes if you're below 3,000, or add 5 more minutes for each 2,000 feet above 6,000).

A few additional notes: To make a milder or hotter salsa, do not change the amount of chile peppers, change the type. You can use all roasted and peeled bell peppers for a really mild salsa, or add some minced habaneros if you really want to to get crazy. I added a tablespoon of chipotle powder to this batch - it added a nice smoky complexity to the sweet and hot, but also darkened the color quite a bit. I also seeded and minced up some fresh jalapenos I'd just picked - just to add a bit more texture and color - enough to bring the amount up to two cups. One of these years, I'm thinking I'll just grind up the peaches without peeling them - might make it even more colorful.

Peachy-keen, Jellybean

I love tree-ripened peaches. My dad planted a couple of peach trees when I was a kid, and I was thereafter spoiled for supermarket peaches. I'll see them in the store and they look pretty, but there's no aroma. You can take them home and they'll soften, but they never will taste like peaches. I want my peaches still warm from the sun, eaten right there next to the tree, bending over to keep the juice from dripping down my shirt.

I have a couple of peach trees, but because of our typical tricky Spring weather, here they're an every-third or -fourth year type of crop. My mature nectarine tree set a crop this year, but then succumbed to borers (I'm just heartsick - they're in my pie cherry tree too). Aries cut it down today, but left a sprout that came up from the roots so I'll have to see what comes from that before digging it out completely. I have a pitiful twisted little July Elberta peach tree trying to hang in there. I got about 1/2 bushel of peaches from it three weeks ago. I managed to get a few trays of slices into the dehydrator, and have been stuffing myself on fresh peaches daily since then.

And then, there's what I call the Seedling peach tree. I don't know what kind it is. It just sprouted one summer under the edge of our woodpile. I figure a squirrel buried a seed it stole from somewhere - I don't think it's an Elberta, because its fruit ripens almost a month later. I transplanted the little seedling to the edge of the garden, and then out in the orchard. It's since grown into a nice tree. It lost a couple of branches to borers this year, but is still doing pretty good. I've been testing and tasting, patiently waiting for those peaches to get ripe and hoping the birds will leave me some (I hung a bunch of junk CD's in the branches - hoping the sun glinting as they turn in the wind will frighten them off).

Finally, it was peach-picking day today. The bird-pecked ones I cut into chunks and put into the dehydrator (no room in my freezer). I gave my neighbor a bagful, and made a batch of jam this afternoon. I've set aside 15 pounds for a batch of salsa, and have enough to gorge myself on for a couple more weeks. Eating seasonally from my own labors means I've got to get my fresh peach fix when I can. Oh, but they're soooooo good while they last!

Do You Suffer From OCD?

Do you find yourself stalking every laden fruit tree in your entire neighborhood? Do you need a flatbed truck to get your Farmers Market purchases home? Is everyone on your gift list (and even those that don't know they're on your list) getting a jar of jelly this year? You might be suffering from OCD (Obsessive Canning Disorder - I totally stole that from Throwback at Trapper Creek). If so, you might benefit from reading my most recent post over at the SGF Co-op blog. Check it out!

Start the Water Boiling - It's Applesauce Time

So, my canning season has started. I don't get fruit crops every year, depending on how our late Spring frosts hit, but this year have various apples, pears, Asian pears, plums, peaches, and red grapes. I dry a lot of my fruits, make bumper crops into hard cider, freeze some things, and can a bit. Canning a batch or two of applesauce is on my must-do list every year.

The birds and ground squirrels got all my Gravenstein apples (and most of the Italian prune plums). But the Freedom apples weren't far behind in the ripening schedule and for some reason haven't been as badly attacked (yet). I've hung junk CD's in the branches of most of my fruit trees, hoping the sunlight flashing off the shiny sides twisting in the breeze will startle the birds away, and Aries put up a pole for a whirly-gig too.

I pruned the tree quite a bit earlier this year to open up its shape, and thinned the fruit set while I was at it. So I have some nicely-sized fruit, easy to reach, and very little insect damage. The apples have a nice flavor and crunch for just eating out of hand, but are also supposed to be good for juice and sauce.

I had two half-pints of applesauce left in my pantry. Two days ago, I picked a couple big bowlfuls of the Freedom apples, and sat down in front of a movie on TV to quarter, core, and peel them all. I got them all prepped, soaking in a lemon juice solution, and then had to get ready to go work a tourist outing up at Lake Tahoe. So I put the whole pot into the refrigerator for the night. Yesterday, I drained the apples, put an inch or so of apple juice into the pan, covered it, and started them simmer/steaming. I'd already checked - I had plenty of lids on hand, so I got out a bunch of empty half-pints (the best applesauce size for the two of us), and got lots of jars and rings into my big canner full of water, and started that to heating.

When the apples were soft, I mashed them with a potato masher right in the pot (no sugar, no spices, just apples cooked in a bit of juice - I can always dress it up when I open up individual jars). I've cut notches in 2-pint increments into the handle of a wooden spoon. By standing that up in a pot of sauce I know how many jars it will fill. Even so, I don't put the lids into the hot water until after I have all my jars filled - no use prepping ones I won't need. I had enough for 16 half-pints. Hot jars are filled with hot applesauce to 1/4" headspace, rims wiped clean, hot lids and rings applied.

Our well water is a bit hard, so I always put a splash of vinegar in the water bath water. I process the jars, in the covered canner with water an inch over the top of the top layer of jars, for 10 minutes after the water comes back to a simmer. Set out on my cutting board, I leave them overnight to cool, listening for the lovely "plunk" (they used to "ping" - I think they've changed the thickness or center-shape of the lids in the past few years) as each jar seals.

This morning, all had sealed (yay!). The rings aren't necessary for storing sealed jars - I remove them and, once washed, keep them in a box under the counter. When I empty and then clean a jar, I put an old lid upside-down (to keep the old sealing compound from sticking to the rim) topped with a ring for storage - protecting the rim and keeping the empty jar clean (just hate dealing with boxes of dusty jars, with dead spiders in them). I give the sealed jars a quick rinse under cool running water, dry them off, and stick a little label with item and date on the lid (Mom just writes the date on the lid with a grease pencil). I don't have a big central canned goods storage area - each item has its own particular place. Nineteen jars of applesauce fit into the bottom of an old bread box in my little pantry - just about what the two of us will use in a year.

Canning Salmon

I love salmon. When I get the chance to go out to dinner at a really nice place, odds are I'll order the salmon. Even though I've never lived near an ocean, I've caught and canned my share of salmon. Sockeye salmon, the pink-fleshed tasty kind, spawn and live for a while in fresh water before heading downstream to the sea. But there's also a landlocked variety of sockeye that lives its entire life in fresh water, called kokanee salmon. When I lived in Leadville, I'd try to make it out to my favorite spot on the river in the fall, just before it entered a big mountain reservoir, for salmon snagging (Colorado has a legal snagging season in the fall - the mature salmon heading upstream to spawn aren't interested in hitting a lure, but you can snag them with big weighted treble hooks using a jerk-n-reel tactic. They're going to die anyway, and it's food in the pantry).

My dad loved fishing. Every summer, my folks would camp at mountain reservoirs, taking the boat out all day, rigged for salmon fishing. Mom would take the pressure cooker and jars along, and after a couple of days of fishing success would can the salmon right there at their campsite. Since moving to Nevada, I'd always beg them to bring me jars of salmon when they were coming out to visit. But, while writing my last post, I realized that with the passing of my dad earlier this year, those jars of salmon might not be quite so plentiful now.

My Colorado brother has dad's boat now, he likes to fish, and probably even cans his salmon. But I don't see him very often. My Colorado sister and her husband also have a boat, fish for salmon, and might have to start canning their own catch (Mom might still do it for them - they live close by). So I still might be able to beg jars from family on occasion. But then again, Lake Tahoe, right over the hill, has kokanee in it. I might have to start looking around for someone with a boat, and start canning my own salmon again. When I asked Aries to ask his co-workers about who goes fishing, he said one guy had mentioned maybe trading fresh salmon for our eggs. That would work. Or maybe I can find someone that would trade salmon for my canning efforts - we could split the results (especially if I could get them to return the empty jars for "re-filling"). I'll have to look into that. If you do have access to fresh salmon, whether from salt- or fresh-water, and a pressure cooker or canner, salmon are easy to can.

Canning Salmon
Kokanee aren't as big as ocean salmon, so they're usually canned cut in cross-wise chunks, skin-on, instead of filleted. Gut the fish, and cut off the head and tail. Remove loose scales and clean the skin by scraping. Cut away the flabby belly flap and the fins (cutting down into the flesh to get the fin bones too). Cut crosswise in lengths to fit your jar leaving at least ½" headspace. Pack into sterilized pint jars - straight-sided wide-mouth jars work best. Add 1 teaspoon vinegar to each jar, seal, and process at 10 pounds pressure for 90 minutes.

Salmon creates its own juices during the canning process. Leaving the skin on means more of the Omega 3 oil that makes eating salmon so good for you. The vinegar softens the little bones so that they just disappear. When I use a jar of salmon, I'll drain off the liquid, pull off the skin, and pick out the big backbone sections. Then I'm ready to make salmon patties, dip, pasta salads, all kinds of good eats.

When You Get Free Apples, Make Applesauce

I didn't get much of a fruit crop this year. Just about every time something else came into bloom last Spring, we'd get another freeze. That happens more often than not, but about every three to four years we squeak by and end up with bumper crops of everything. Just not this year for my trees. However, I do know of a big old apple tree, over in the part of town built in the 1860's, on the lawn of a lawyer's office. It had a beautiful bunch of apples this year, and no one ever seems to want them. So, just before the hard freeze, Aries and I took the ladder over and picked a bushel box full (free is good - and I did take a bucketful into the office to share too).

I went through and separated out any that had blemishes - to eat now and to make a batch of applesauce (and a pie too - Aries does love apple pie). I don't know what kind of apples they are (no one else does, either), so I don't know if they'll keep very well, but I put the really nice ones down in the cellar and will keep an eye on them. If they do store well, I might try rooting a cutting (oh, I'll probably try it anyway - I don't know if it's the micro-climate where it's growing or if it is just perfectly adapted to the area, but it did set a nice crop when my trees didn't). The apples look a bit like Jonathans.

Applesauce is probably the easiest thing there is to make and can. All you need is a paring knife, a pot to cook them in, and a potato masher (apple juice, jars, and boiling water bath optional). I sat down in front of the TV to watch a movie, cut the apples into quarters, cored and peeled them and put the chunks into a pot of water with some lemon juice added. When I was ready to cook them, I drained out the water and added apple juice to cover the bottom of the pot maybe an inch. I think cooking them with juice instead of water makes for a better end product. I use a flame-tamer under the pot, and cook them with the lid on until soft. It's more steaming than boiling them. In the meantime, I get my boiling water bath heating up, sterilizing jars and rings (half-pints fit our needs best). When the apples are soft, I just mash them up with the potato masher, fill the jars to ¼", seal, and process 10 minutes after the water starts to boil again.

Enchilada Sauce (pressure canned)

Another annual tomato processing project around here is canning a batch of enchilada sauce. I grow and dry my own peppers (and the onions, garlic, and thyme), but if you have some extra tomatoes and a pressure canner/cooker it might be worth your while to shop for the dried chiles. Most of our grocery stores here have a Hispanic foods section, with a pegboard display of herbs, spices, and dried chiles in cellophane packets. I always check there for herbs - prices are a lot better than buying the little jars in the spice aisle (then just transfer them to the recycled glass jars of my spice rack). In my supermarket, more than enough dried chiles for this recipe were less than $3.

The big chiles are usually labeled California or New Mexico chiles. They're the pretty shiny chiles most often hung up as a decoration (if you're using ones from a decorative string, make sure they haven't been varnished or treated with any kind of preservative coating. If you use them from the bottom, you can keep the string looking nice, if just a bit shorter). Chipotle is really a generic term meaning any smoked chile. Jalapeños are the ones most commonly preserved this way, so here chipotle usually means a smoked jalapeño. But the cellophane packets are marketed to Spanish-speakers, so the smoked chiles you want for this recipe will more likely be labeled Morita (or maybe Tipico). They'll look like little wrinkled reddish-brown cigar butts.

Enchilada Sauce (8 pints)

2 onions + 3 bulbs garlic, drizzled with olive oil (no need to peel, just make sure root end is clean). Wrap in foil packet, roast 45 minutes at 375º.

8 dried California + 24 Chipotle chiles. Rinse with cool water, remove stems, cover with boiling water and soak 45 minutes. Drain before proceeding.

4 pounds tomatoes, cored and halved

Add veggies above to 6 quarts water with 8 sprigs thyme (about 3 tablespoons dried) and 4 teaspoons non-iodized salt. Simmer 45 minutes.

Discard half the cooking water (about 3 quarts - I ladle it out, pouring it through a wire sieve into a measuring bowl). Puree the veggies (I just run it all through my blender - I don't have a food mill, but that would probably work too) and press through wire sieve along with remaining cooking water. Discard the dry pulp remaining in the sieve. Fill sterilized pint jars to ½" headspace. Seal, pressure-can 50 minutes at 7-10 pounds pressure (depending on what type of pressure regulator you have). Let canner return to zero pressure on its own before opening.

Making Enchiladas
One pint of the sauce above makes a 9x13" pan of 12 enchiladas. This sauce is hot, a concentrate, and needs to be stretched and mellowed. Traditional recipes use cream (8 ounces sour or whipping), or you can use a can of evaporated milk, but I usually whisk one can of condensed cream of mushroom soup into the pint of sauce. Prepare approximately 2 cups of filling (beef, or shrimp & crab, or pork, or leftover turkey, or sauteed onion & mushroom with tofu, or eggs & potatoes, or whatever else you think might be good. I'm going to experiment with diced eggplant - don't tell Aries) binding it together with a bit of sauce. Soften corn tortillas according to package directions. Divide filling equally, roll up in the tortillas, and place in baking pan seam-side down. Pour sauce mixture over all, smooshing them down with your spatula to completely cover and soak edges of the tortillas. Top with shredded cheddar (optional - and I also sprinkle with chopped black olives). Bake uncovered 400º 20 minutes or until bubbling. Comer, beber, y reir (Eat, drink and laugh)!

Hot Sauce Recipes

Aries is on vacation for two weeks so he's around the house, getting in my way, and helping out. It was nice today, so he was out in the garden, cleaning up everything that froze, shredding it, cleaning out the chicken coop, and mixing it all together to start our compost for next year. I spent most of the day in the kitchen. I had enough paste tomatoes ripe to make a batch of tomato sauce, so I got the tomatoes started cooking down. Then, once I had the water heating for sterilizing jars, I figured I might as well do something with the hot peppers.

I'm just about out of the Jalapeño Hot Sauce I made in 2006, but I didn't get very many jalapeño peppers this year. What few I had, I just sliced and froze. This is the recipe I usually make every couple of years:

Jalapeño Hot Sauce (makes 20 oz.)

1 t vegetable oil
20 fresh Jalapeño peppers, sliced
3 cloves garlic, minced
½ C minced onion
¾ t non-iodized salt
2 C water
½ C sugar (optional)
1 C white vinegar

Over high heat, in glass, enameled or stainless steel pan, sauté oil, peppers, garlic, onion, and salt for 4 minutes. Add water and sugar, and simmer 20 minutes, stirring often. Remove from heat and let cool to room temperature.

Transfer mixture to food processor or blender and puree until smooth. With machine running, slowly add vinegar. Pour into sterilized jars or bottles with tight-fitting lids. This sauce will keep for months when stored in the refrigerator.

I save and reuse little glass bottles, especially the ones that have an inside shaker/dribbler-type cap, like sesame oil or wine vinegar. Using jalapeños makes a reasonably mild green sauce.

But with no jalapeños, I decided to experiment with cayenne peppers. The cayennes that were red ripe on the plants at harvest time I'd hung up to dry. The rest of them, I'd dumped into a bowl on the counter for a couple of weeks. Quite a few of them ripened up red too, so I substituted 15 big red meaty cayenne peppers for the jalapeños in the recipe above. Since they're hotter, and a lot of peppers' heat is in the inside ribs and seeds, I de-ribbed and seeded them (wearing latex surgical gloves - very important to wear gloves when working with hot peppers!). I'm thinking it should turn out like Tabasco sauce. It's on the left in the photo.

I also got a few Habanero peppers this year. Only a couple were orange ripe at harvest, but left in a bowl on the counter, almost all turned orange eventually. Some of those, I strung up to dry, and a few more I de-ribbed, seeded, and froze. With the rest, I thought I'd try an experimental adaptation of the jalapeño recipe, combined with the memory of a Habanero hot sauce I bought when I was in Belize. That's it in the middle, making for a very nice hot sauce rainbow.

Green Tomato Piccalilli

Piccalilli is a green tomato sweet relish. My dad's side of the family is from Texas, and you can't eat black-eyed peas and cornbread without a glop of piccalilli on top. It's also really good in tuna salad, or any other place you'd use pickle relish. A pint jar usually lasts me about a year (opened jars have enough sugar and vinegar to store well refrigerated), and my nearby siblings will beg a jar now and then, so this is something I'll make every 4-5 years.

Piccalilli (8-9 pints)
Grind (or chop in a food processor) 8 pounds green tomatoes (optional: and 1 small jar pimento peppers). Add 4 pounds brown sugar, then simmer 3 hours.

Then add:
1 quart vinegar
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground cloves
1 teaspoon mace
Boil 15 minutes more, then pour into hot sterilized jars and seal. (That's all there is to Mom's recipe, but I put the hot jars into a boiling water bath for 10 minutes just to make sure they seal)

What to Do With Green Tomatoes

Forecasted low for tomorrow night is 25 last I looked, so I was out in the garden again today trying to pick/dig/store most everything that a hard freeze will harm. One of my local readers emailed, asking what to do with all her green tomatoes (a very likely occurrence around here - forget growing Brandywine or Beefsteaks; we're lucky to get vine-ripened Early Girls). I picked just about all my tomatoes five days ago. I break away all the stems as I pick them, as those can puncture the other tomatoes, leaving holes and bruises that will rot instead of ripen. I leave the hard, little green ones, with an almost frosty white look to them - they won't ripen and aren't big enough to do much else with (don't really care to pickle them). But any green tomato close to full size, especially with darker green shadowing on the top part, is easy to ripen indoors.

The paste tomatoes I want to ripen quickly, so I can get them processed and out of my way. Some say to pull up entire plants and hang them upside down (say, in the garage) to ripen green tomatoes. That's too messy. When the tomatoes get ripe, they'll fall and splatter. And forget the old-timers advice to wrap each green tomato in newspaper - too time-consuming and too hard to see when they're ripe. The best way I've found is to spread out an old shower curtain or other piece of plastic, then spread the green and orangy ones out in one layer. Then, cover them all with a couple layers of newspapers. This traps the ethylene gas, same way the old-timers' wrapping method did, but it's so much easier to just lift the paper to pull out the ripe ones. Top photo shows my paste tomatoes five days ago, on the table that just fits over my guest room bed. Lower photo shows them today, after five days under the newspapers. The red ones, I'll can whole in a day or so; the orange ones will be ready for a batch of sauce in a few more days, and the ones green now will be ready for second batch of sauce not long after that. Within two weeks, I've got my sewing/crafting table back, and a full pantry!

The green Early Girls I want to ripen slowly, so I can have fresh slicing tomatoes as long as possible. I've got them on a tray down in the cooler cellar. It's about 50 degrees down there now - cooler than in the house, but not as cold as the refrigerator. Refrigerating fresh whole tomatoes wipes out just about all the taste, so I never do that, but the cellar is cool enough to let them ripen slowly. I can eat fresh tomatoes until early December. Maybe your house has a cooler closet, or a spot under the bed that would work for you.

Of course, you can always make Fried Green Tomatoes (firm red ones will work too). Slice tomatoes, 1/2" thick, and dredge them in flour with a bit of salt and sugar added. Brown the slices in a bit of butter or oil until crisp (to be authentically Southern about it, you'd use bacon grease), turning them only once. Keep cooked slices warm in a dish in a warm oven. When all the tomatoes are cooked, gradually pour some milk into the frying pan, stirring constantly to make "gravy". Add salt and pepper to taste, and pour over the cooked tomatoes. Serve right away, before the tomatoes get soggy.

Barbecue Sauce to Can

I'm staying busy, trying to get my harvest in while the weather holds for me. Of course, the longer we go without a killing frost, the more I'll have to harvest, even having to go back over some crops again (I'm not complaining!). Luckily, I have lots of my canning recipes already typed so can get another post done quite quickly. Here's another water bath canning recipe for those tomatoes (the vinegar makes it acidic enough for the water bath method). Hope you planted lots! This, of course, is good on meats, but also can be used to turn cooked, drained, white beans into yummy baked beans.

Barbecue Sauce (8 – 9 pints, depending on what kind of tomatoes you use - you don't want to let it get too thick, cook it down to a good saucy consistency)

15 pounds tomatoes, cored and smashed, cooked down to ± 8 pints, then sieved through a wire mesh strainer

Liquefy in blender and add to sieved tomatoes:
2 C chopped onions
3 large garlic cloves
1 C brown sugar
¾ C white sugar
1½ C vinegar
4 T worcheshire sauce
2 T dry mustard
2 T chipotle powder (or other hot pepper powder)
2 T liquid smoke

Cook back down to ± 8 pints. Leave ¼" headspace when filling sterilized jars, process 30 minutes in a boiling water bath.

I've measured and made notches on a wooden spoon handle so I know when I'm getting close to 8 pints in my enameled cooking pot. A full canner load for me is 9 narrow-mouth pints, so most of my recipes are adapted to that amount.

Tomato Paste Balls (refrigerator storage)

Today was a busy day - I was up early and off to a Soroptimist District Meeting in Yerington, about 90 minutes drive away. Plus, it was hot out today - I'm tired! Tomorrow, I'm meeting a girlfriend for lunch and wandering about the monstrous Crafts Faire (around 350 vendors) in Genoa for their annual Candy Dance. So this is a quick post of a tomato preservation recipe for those that have paste/Roma-type tomatoes to play with. Tomato paste is nice to have around, but an open can or jar will often mold before I use it all. With this old Italian recipe, the paste is cooked/dried until it can be rolled into little one-tablespoon balls and stored in oil. A quart jarful fits easily in the back of my refrigerator, and usually lasts us a couple of years.

Tomato Paste (3/4 quart jar of 1" balls)
6 quarts paste tomatoes - cored and smashed, then cooked until soft and sieved through a wire mesh strainer (really press out all liquid possible; you can then dry what's left and powder it for a vegie seasoning blend, or the chickens love it)

Liquefy in blender and add to sieved tomatoes (pour through strainer too):
1 T salt
1 celery stalk, with leaves
¾ C chopped onion
1 sweet red bell pepper, seeds and ribs removed
¾ t pepper

Cook down to a thick paste (I cook it in an open crockpot overnight to eliminate constant stirring or possible burning). It's thick enough when a spoonful doesn't drip off when turned upside down (if too wet, it could mold before it dries). Spread ½" or less thick on glass plates, score into 1½" diamonds, and let dry until paste can be scraped up and rolled into 1" balls (not so dry that it turns into leather, and it's easier if you oil your hands). Layer balls in sterilized wide-mouth quart jar, cover completely with olive oil, and store in the refrigerator. Scoop out balls as needed (each one is approximately one tablespoon), mashing and stirring into hot liquid to thin if necessary, and making sure remaining balls are still covered with oil. Excess oil is good in salad dressings.