Peppers without pain
Sep 11th, 2007 by Julie Kirkwood
I learned my lesson when it comes to hot peppers — don’t touch!
I’m happy to report that I spent about three hours in the kitchen yesterday working with hot peppers from the garden and had no mishaps whatsoever. The secret? Rubber gloves.
I made hot pepper sauce. Between the two recipes I tried, I had to chop the peppers raw and remove the seeds (the process that caused me so much pain last time) and also blanch them in boiling vinegar, roast them under the broiler and scoop seeds and veins out of slimy roasted and reconstituted dehydrated hot peppers.
The end result is pretty tasty:
In the process I learned that canning food is not easy. It involves equipment and knowledge I don’t have.
Much like sewing, canning seems to be one of those skills that used to be so common that nobody wrote down directions. Somehow within a generation or two nobody learns how to do it anymore.
I have patience for a lot of activities like that, including sewing, but canning just doesn’t grab me. I boiled the jars to sterilize them and heated the sauces to steaming before packing them, but that’s where I quit. I believe there are many other steps required, such as leaking air out of the seal and boiling the packed jars for a certain amount of time in a special canning aparatus but my instructions didn’t specify. I’ll just keep the sauce in the refrigerator.
