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.

Finding Mother

Mother of vinegar, that is. I wanted to try making vinegar out of some of our hard apple cider. I've been reading up on it. Susy, over at Chiot's Run, sent me a link to a great tutorial from the Sunset magazine website. Since cider vinegar is made from apple juice that has first been fermented into alcohol, half my work was already done.

Supposedly, vinegar flies carry the right type of bacteria needed to convert alcohol into vinegar - so you want to get the flies to your cider (or wine) while at the same time keeping all the other airborne wild bacterias out. Mother of vinegar is then produced by the right kind of bacteria. Once you have some mother, you can keep it going just like a sourdough starter. Maybe we don't have vinegar flies in high desert; maybe they die off in the cold; maybe local bad bacterias kill off the good stuff - I don't know. I've tried making vinegar a couple of times before, but I never ended up with anything even remotely edible. I needed some other way of finding my vinegar mother.

When my (actual) mom was visiting, her flight home was out of the San Francisco airport. So after spending time with me in Nevada, the plan was: we'd meet up with my California sister in one of the Sierra foothill towns, halfway between our houses, and then Mom would go home with Sis. We decided to spend the day at Apple Hill, near Placerville, for our meeting place.

So we met for lunch, and then spent the afternoon checking out my favorite Apple Hill vendors. One of them, Denver Dan's, sells lots of flavored cider vinegars. Light bulb moment! I asked to talk to the owner, asking if he would sell me a little bit of vinegar mother. He ended up up just giving me a little jar with about a tablespoon scraped out of the bottom of one of his barrels. That was enough.

Following the directions from the tutorial, I poured three bottles of my hard cider into a glass gallon jar, added half again as much water (since my cider was made with added sugar, I'm sure it has a pretty high alcohol content), stirred in the mother (a rubbery, white goo), topped it off with some cheesecloth (mother needs air), and set it inside a top cupboard, where it would be warm and dark. And it's working! I haven't tasted it yet, but it smells really good. The mother multiplied in the bottom of the jar, and a fresh layer is now starting to form on the top, just like it should, converting the alcohol into vinegar. I'm so excited! I still have lots of apples, so I'm thinking I'll press out some more juice and let it ferment without adding sugar, just so I can keep my vinegar jar going. Maybe I'll start a second jar with leftover red wine too.

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.

Salmon Dip or Spread

I'm going to a potluck holiday party this evening, and I'm supposed to bring an appetizer. The party is in Reno, about a good half hour's drive away, so I didn't want to do anything hot that would get cold, or cold that would be wilted by the time I got there. I didn't even ask about the availability of kitchen equipment - once I get to the party I didn't want to be cooking anything there. Mom's Salmon Dip is always a crowd-pleaser - that would be perfect.

I already had all the ingredients. I'd bought a big carton of soft cream cheese for stuffing celery for Thanksgiving, and had plenty left. Canned salmon is readily available in the grocery store, if a bit pricey, but I still have a couple of jars the folks had canned, fishing in Colorado. But I couldn't find my recipe! And here, I'd just written over at the Simple Green Frugal Co-op about how I really do need to organize my recipes better. How embarrassing! But it's Mom's recipe, Mom's at my sister's house right now, and besides, I knew my sister loves that recipe and frequently takes it to potlucks too. So I gave her a call (and that recipe is now securely enshrined in my little Grey Book).

Salmon Dip (makes a little over 2 cups)
Note: start the dried onion reconstituting about 20 minutes ahead of time

8 oz. cream cheese, softened
13 oz. canned salmon, drained, skin and bones removed
4 teaspoons dried minced onion, pre-soaked in
4 tablespoons lemon juice
3 teaspoons horseradish (I know on my recipe, if I ever find it, that I have that written as 1 tablespoon. So I asked Frogtail why write it like that? She said because a tablespoon doesn't fit in the horseradish jar. Good point.)

Mix everything together and refrigerate.

This can be just mounded on a platter, surrounded by crackers or little toasts. But looking through my cupboard, I spied a vintage cup, from when Tiki Bars were all the rage, from the now long-gone Top of the Wheel restaurant up at Lake Tahoe. It was the perfect size, so I packed the dip in there - it'll travel better. The party is an employee one for the tour guide company I work for. I think they'll get a kick out of this presentation. I've got a bowl for the crackers, so I'll just swing by the grocery store on my way out of town, pick up a box of Wheat Thins, and I'm all set (and if they don't eat it all, I'm getting me some onion bagels on my way back through town - that'll make a decadent breakfast tomorrow. I suppose I should mention that this freezes nicely too - I can save half for a New Year's Day brunch).

Basil Pesto

I always start a few sweet basil plants in Spring, and plant them out in the tomato and pepper bed. I start picking leaves as soon as possible to use fresh all summer long. But basil is one of the first things nipped once the nighttime temps drop even close to freezing. When that time comes (2-3 weeks yet? maybe?), I'll cut what ever is left and hang to dry. In the meantime, the plants are lush and I just cut a big bunch to make another batch of pesto to freeze for later.

I swish the basil through a couple sinkfuls of cold water, pile it back into the wire harvest basket, take it outside and swing it vigorously 'round and 'round overhead (the country version of a salad spinner), then bring it back in and dump it into the dish drainer to dry completely. Pick just the completely dry leaves from the stems, until you have a 2-cup measure packed tightly full. My recipe is adapted from one published by Ellen Ecker Ogden in her book From the Cook's Garden, where I got the idea to add a bit of lemon juice to the traditional recipe.

Basil Pesto (makes two ½-pint jars)

4 garlic cloves
2 cups tightly packed basil leaves
¼ cup pine nuts
¼ cup lemon juice
½ cup extra virgin olive oil (plus extra for topping off jar)
¼ cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese

Starting with just the garlic, then adding the rest, blend everything together in a blender (you can use a food processor - I don't have one - or if you want to really do it the traditional way, use a mortar & pestle to pound everything together), stopping frequently to mash everything down until it churns continuously in an homogeneous paste. Divide between two ½-pint jars, leaving ½" expansion room, smooth the tops, add enough oil to completely cover the pesto, add lids (can reuse clean old ones), and freeze. If you have any left over, make yourself a pesto and tomato sandwich!

All winter long, I thaw out a jar as needed - stirring glops into soups or pasta dishes, spreading on sandwiches or pizza, topping veggies or chicken. Keep a thawed jar refrigerated, and just make sure to re-smooth the top and add more oil to cover as needed. Made now, it will bring a welcome taste of summer brightness to those dark winter nights.

Egg Dressing for Spinach Salad

Wondering what to do with all those Easter eggs? Here's one of my favorite recipes using hard-boiled eggs. Easter is so early this year that I don't have any spinach from my garden just yet. No matter, urban sprawl has brought a grocery store just down the street. With this dressing, I like a salad of just spinach leaves, some very thin slices of a mild red onion, and sliced fresh button mushrooms. The egg yolks dissolve when shaken to emulsify the dressing, and the whites will sink to the bottom if the dressing sits for a while. If you're making an individual salad, store the extra dressing in the refrigerator, use within 3 days, and spoon the dressing on to distribute the whites of the eggs equally.

Egg Dressing for Spinach Salad (makes enough for one family-size salad, or 3-4 individual salads)

½ cup olive oil
3 tablespoons red wine vinegar
1 teaspoon seasoned salt (I use Lawry's)
2 hard-cooked eggs, peeled and chopped into ½" dice

Put everything into a jar with a tight-fitting lid and shake well. It's best to use one with a plastic or enameled lid, to avoid any interaction between the acidic vinegar and a metallic lid. Toss with salad just before serving.