Monthly Archives: September 2011

Ají Limón Jelly

I was disappointed with the way my Jalapeño jelly turned out last week. So today I decided to make a new kind of jelly: Ají Limón Jelly.

I picked a few of the Ají Limón peppers from the garden. They smell like a combination of Habaneros and lemons, which is probably where they get their name. We picked up a few more ingredients and made some jelly. I used a modified version of last year’s Habanero jelly recipe. I used yellow bell peppers instead of red and I added some lemon juice. I’m really happy with the way it turned out.

Ingredients:
3 Large Yellow Bell Peppers
10 Ají Limón Peppers
½ Cup Lemon Juice
1 ½ Cups White Distilled Vinegar (5% Acidity)
7 Cups Sugar
9 Oz Certo (or your favorite liquid fruit pectin)

Directions:
1- Put on gloves for safety. Really. You should never cut hot peppers such as Habaneros or Ají Limóns without gloves. If you do, you’ll end up regretting it. When you have your gloves on, slice all peppers into chunks small enough to fit in your blender, removing all seeds and ribs as you go. Ají Limón peppers are perfect for this, as they have very few seeds to begin with.

2- Put peppers, lemon juice, and vinegar into your blender and blend till smooth. I just pushed the ‘Smoothie’ button on my blender and 30 seconds later it was perfect. Pour pepper mixture into a large sauce pan on low heat.

3- Slowly add all 7 cups of sugar to the mixture, stirring constantly, until all the sugar is completely dissolved into the mixture. Bring the sugary mixture to a boil, then drop it back to low heat. Let it simmer for 20 minutes.

4- Strain the mixture as desired. If you want “jelly” then you should pour the mixture through at least one layer of cheesecloth. I prefer my jelly more like a jam, so I just removed any obvious pepper chunks with a spoon and called it good. I didn’t strain it any more than that.

5- Add all 9 ounces of your liquid fruit pectin to the strained mixture on low heat. Stir about one minute, or until the pectin has dissolved.

6- Bring the mixture to a hard rolling boil for one full minute, stirring constantly.

7- Remove from heat. You’re done.

At this point we used a ladle to scoop it into sanitized jars, then processed them in a water bath for 10 minutes. We used 4 oz and 8 oz jars. If you use larger jars, you may need a longer processing time. In our kitchen, we filled 12 of the 4 oz jars and 3 of the 8 oz jars using this recipe. Your mileage may vary.

A word of caution about cleaning up after slicing hot peppers. When you put your knife, cutting board, blender, etc. into hot water, the steam will have a lot of “kick”. Be careful not to breathe too much of it in.

Serrano Season

Earlier this week, Charmaine made some of the best Tikka Masala we have had the privilege to eat. It was near perfect. The two things that made the difference between this and previous attempts were: 1- She blended the ingredients in the blender and 2- She used some fresh Serrano and Cayenne peppers from the garden. It really was amazing.

Knowing that we can’t pick fresh Serrano peppers all year, she came up with a plan: freeze them and put them in ziplock freezer bags. She has been buying frozen Thai peppers to use in her Thai cooking for years, so it stands to reason that our Serrano peppers would work just as well. We picked a little over 500 of them from the garden, washed them, dried them, put them on cookie sheets, and stuck them in the freezer for a few hours. After they were frozen, we packed them into little ziplock bags and stuck them back in the freezer. So far it seems to be working perfectly.

I just need to convince Charmaine to make some more Indian curry!

Serranos

Preservation time

The big news this week is that we have no choice but to find ways to preserve things. We can’t give stuff away fast enough any more. The first time you heat up that water bath and start preparing jars for canning, it’s pretty exciting. Every time after that, it’s just a lot of work.

We sliced and stewed about a hundred tomatoes, put them in bags, and stuck them in the freezer. We’ll make something with them later.

Next we blanched hundreds of tomatoes, peeled them, and made more than 2 gallons of salsa. The salsa was necessary, because the peppers have been coming in like crazy. We used something like 6 cups of chopped Anaheim peppers, 2 cups of chopped Jalapeño peppers, and several large bell peppers in the salsa. We cooked it, poured it into jars, and canned it. Fresh salsa is so much better than canned salsa, but we’ll be able to use this salsa all winter, when fresh salsa just isn’t an option.

Making salsa didn’t use all the tomatoes, and it didn’t come anywhere close to using all the peppers I had picked that day. I was still staring at a gallon of peeled tomatoes, 70 or 80 Jalapeño peppers, and 15 or 20 extremely large Anaheim peppers.

I looked up a recipe for Jalapeno Jelly. I picked one and doubled it. Then I doubled the number of Jalapenos in it. I wanted my jelly to have some kick. I also swapped the vinegar for half lemon and half lime juice. I threw all the peppers and lemon juice into the blender and pushed the smoothie button. It turned into a foamy green smoothie. I tasted a bit of it. It was really good. It tasted like a very tart citrus drink, but then moments later your mouth and throat burned. I was a little worried I had over done it with the peppers, but it was too late to change. All in all, I think we used about 40 Jalapeños in that recipe that made twelve 4 ounce jars and one 12 ounce jar of jelly. After it cooled, it wasn’t hot. It barely has any kick at all. And it doesn’t taste all that great. I’m pretty disappointed. The Habanero jelly we made last year was much much better. Oh well.

We still had 30 or 40 Jalapeño peppers sitting there and I was out of ideas. Luckily, those are the easiest pieces of produce to give away. Everyone loves them. Charmaine took them to work (along with a whole load of other stuff) and got rid of them all.

As for the rest of the tomatoes, we had Charmaine’s parents over for dinner, so we used some of the peppers and the remaining tomatoes in a pasta sauce with some fancy noodles we picked up at Tony Caputo’s Market in Salt Lake. It turned out really well.

Today I noticed some bright yellow Ají Limóns in the garden. Just last week they were completely green, but now they are a beautiful bright yellow. They’re fairly hot. I can eat a fresh Cayenne pepper without too much crying, but I can’t get through one of these Ají Limóns… and yet, I am somehow compelled to keep trying.

Dehydrating Tomatoes

We picked 27 pounds of tomatoes on Saturday. It was the first time this year that I’ve actually weighed anything. I always think produce weighs more than it does. I estimated the tomatoes would weigh close to 40 pounds, so when they came in under 30, I decided to revise my estimates for last week. Instead of 20 pounds of tomatoes last week, I’m going to say we picked 15 pounds last week.

Of course, we picked a lot more than 27 pounds of tomatoes this week. The 27 pounds was just what we picked on Saturday. But we had been picking tomatoes all week. 35 pounds would be a very conservative estimate. That’s pretty exciting. And there are a lot more that will need to be picked in the next few days.

We have been dehydrating tomatoes and making salsa like we’re crazy. The Ronco dehydrator can’t keep up with the influx of tomatoes, so we’ve been using our oven as well. It actually has a dehydrate mode, so we can set the temperature, timer, etc. I wasn’t sure how hot to set it, but so far we’ve been using 140 degrees and it seems to be working well. We tend to cut the tomato slices thicker and thicker in an attempt to get more tomatoes on the trays at the same time. 1/2 an inch is about as thick as I dare go, but it makes it easy to get a ton of tomatoes in the oven at once.

I didn’t keep track of all the peppers we’ve picked this week, but I’m guessing we picked about 20 large green bell peppers, 30 jalapeño peppers, 20 banana peppers, 10 serrano peppers, and 10 cayenne peppers. I try to give away as many hot peppers as I can, since we have so many. Anytime I give away peppers, I always include some hot peppers and tell them they can throw them away if they can’t figure out how to use them.

As for me, I’ve started getting creative with my use of hot peppers as well. I even chopped up about 1/3 of a cayenne pepper into my fruit smoothie today. I think I’ll use 1/2 of one tomorrow.

We also started picking our cantaloupe this week. So far they’re just parked in the fridge, but I expect to cut into them in the next few days.