Peppers Peppers Everywhere!

This weekend was all about using up some peppers before they started to go bad out in the garden.  One bad thing about having a garden so big is not having the amount of time needed this time of year to get everything used up, and I HATE to waste!

Saturday I spent the day making some homemade pasta sauce to be later used with stuffed peppers.  I turned out great but needed about 24 hrs straight of simmering to get thick enough.  I used my victorio strainer to process the tomatoes - its so awesome.  You don't have to blanch and remove and skins, and all that you are left with is seeds and skins.   I strained the meat/juice coming out so the sauce would start out thicker than normal.  The juice I boiled to make homemade tomato juice. 

Future sauce....

Straining....

Out of all the maters, this is the only waste... skins and seeds.

Once I got the sauce started, it was time for poppers...  and boy did I forget how long these things take!  The longest (and most tedious) is halving and deseeding all the peppers!  I have found that using a grapefruit spoon is the best tool for deseeding!

Lots of peppers...

At least it looked like I was having fun... with sexy rubber gloves and all!

My assembly line... 
halved peppers, then cheese filling, then egg, then crushed cornflakes. 

The final product... oh so so yummy!!

I made 6 cookie sheets full - at that point I ran out of the cheese filling ingredients.  We bought more the next day (and actually that is what I will be working on when I'm done writing up this blog).  I didn't finish the poppers till 1am with cleanup & such.

Recipe is (I normally do a double or triple batch).  I think even with single batch you need more than 15 peppers...

Ingredients

• 1 (8 ounce) package cream cheese, softened
• 1 (8 ounce) package shredded sharp Cheddar cheese
• 1/4 cup mayonnaise
• 15 fresh jalapeno peppers, halved lengthwise and seeded
• 2 eggs, beaten
• 1/2 tablespoon milk
• 1 1/2 cups crushed corn flake cereal

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Lightly grease a medium baking sheet.
2. In a medium bowl, mix together cream cheese, sharp Cheddar cheese and mayonnaise. Stuff jalapeno halves with the mixture.
3. Whisk together eggs and milk in a small bowl. Place crushed corn flake cereal in a separate small bowl.
4. Dip each stuffed jalapeno half into the egg and milk mixture, then roll in corn flake cereal to coat.
5. Arrange in a single layer on the prepared baking sheet. Bake in the preheated oven 30 minutes, or until filling is bubbly and lightly browned.

Sunday morning I started out making some hot sauce.  I started with a Jalapeno hot sauce using the green jalapenos that were too thin or short to be really good for poppers.

Sauteing with the onions and garlic.

After they were doing cooking for 20mins with water.  Water is pretty much gone at the end.

After blending it all up and added the vinegar.

ready to give away as gifts...

I doubled this recipe as well since I had so many I needed to use up.  I fill 4 1/2 pint jars which I canned/sealed - one left over not completely full that we just put in the frig to use now.

Ingredients

    1 teaspoon vegetable oil
    20 fresh jalapeno peppers, sliced
    3 cloves garlic, minced
    1/2 cup minced onion
    3/4 teaspoon salt
    2 cups water
    1 cup distilled white vinegar

Directions

    In a medium glass or enamel lined sauce pan over high heat, combine oil, peppers, garlic, onion and salt; saute for 4 minutes. Add the water and cook for 20 minutes, stirring often. Remove from heat and allow mixture to cool to room temperature.
    Transfer the mixture to a food processor and puree until smooth. With the processor running, slowly add the vinegar.

Next I made stuffed bell peppers to freeze for winter.  I was searching for a different way to make them this time (vegetarian recipe) and came across a couple that we want to try.  I was gonna do one batch of one, and another of the other - but after making the 1st batch I had so much stuffing left over that I just did all 17 peppers with the one recipe.  Was super easy and oh so good!

Peppers fresh out of the oven!

We made some mashed potatoes from the garden potatoes to go with dinner... you can't eat stuffed peppers without mashed potatoes... I think its a law or something!

Dinner was so good!  We even added some of the 1st hot sauce to the taters & pepper!
The pasta sauce turned out wonderfully as well!

The recipe for these peppers is:

Ingredients

• 1 cup uncooked white rice
• 1 (15 ounce) can black beans, drained and rinsed
• 1 tablespoon chili powder
• 4 green bell peppers
• 16 slices Swiss cheese
• 1 (15 ounce) can tomato sauce

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees F (200 degrees C).
2. In a saucepan bring 2 cups water to a boil. Add rice and stir. Reduce heat, cover and simmer for 20 minutes.
3. Combine cooked rice with black beans and chili powder. Cut the tops off of the peppers and remove the ribs and seeds. Spoon about 2 tablespoons of the rice and bean mixture into the bottoms of the peppers. Lay a slice of cheese on top and repeat 3 more times, ending with cheese on top.
4. Bake in preheated oven until peppers soften, about 45 minutes.
5. Meanwhile, heat tomato sauce in a small saucepan over low to medium heat. Slice peppers in half, top with tomato sauce and serve. 

The 2nd hot sauce I made was with the red jalapenos.  This one I have sitting in my frig in a quart jar now with a note for me to remember to strain on Sept 25th.  

 

This last one just looked so perfect... reminded me of the Chili's restaurant logo

After it cooked and cooled down...  right before I blended it.

recipe for this one is:

Homemade Tabasco Style Hot Sauce Recipe

Because the chiles are not aged in oak barrels for three years, this will be only a rough approximation of the famous McIlhenny product. You will have to grow your own tabasco peppers or substitute dried ones that have been rehydrated. Other small, hot, fresh red chiles can also be substituted for the tabascos.

1 pound fresh red tabasco chiles, chopped
2 cups distilled white vinegar
2 teaspoons salt

Combine the chiles and the vinegar in a saucepan and heat. Stir in the salt and simmer for 5 minutes. Remove from the heat, cool, and place in a blender. Puree until smooth and place in a glass jar. Allow to steep for 2 weeks in the refrigerator. Remove, strain the sauce, and adjust the consistency by adding more vinegar if necessary.

Now with all these peppers cooking in the kitchen - it sometimes got a little hard to breathe in there... I think Alexander was trying to save himself....

I was gonna also make hot sauce with the serrano peppers today as well - but just ran out of time.  Luckily I hadn't picked them yet.  Wanted to make sure I used up the jalapenos since they were all picked already.  I'll have to make that sauce something later this week.

Start of the major harvest...

So my Jeep is in the shop till at least Monday, so I'm not going anywhere....  which gives me a lot more time to work in the garden this weekend.... actually I needed to with being gone in PA a couple weeks ago, it put me behind in some garden tending....

So figured it was time to massively harvest some of the veggies before they go bad.  Corn & beans were the major ones.  I picked an entire bucket full of the Blue Lake bush beans, which ended up as 4 one-gallon bags of beans for the freezer.  I still have to pick the Blue Kentucky pole beans and the Trail of Tears black pole beans (altho I think I'm gonna harvest them as dried beans for winter storage).

 

Mo helped out a BUNCH today.  She picked all the corn, at least that she could find.  With the 3-Sister garden that I planted... the beans and even some of the squash climbing up the corn stalks had so much weight that it made some of the stalks bend over... so we might find a few more ears once we start picking the pole beans.   I was able to process 4 quart bags and 1 gallon freezer bags of corn today.  This is in addition to the 8 quart bags I put in the freeze a week ago. 

What a messy messy process!!

Mo also picked all the ripe tomatoes for me today...  the island is almost completely full!  We enjoyed one of them for our lunch, so so good!!  I'm hoping tomorrow to be able to make a few batches of salsa to can for winter use.  We seem to go thru the salsa more than anything else I can.

5 varieties - Jersey Giant, Mortgage Lifter, Big Boy, Mater Sandwich, & Margherita

This is the 1st year to plant any potatoes.  We did both normal as well as sweet potatoes.  I decided to dig up part of them up today.  I dug up about 1/2 of the normal potatoes - they look so good and I will definitely be planting many many more next year so we have a lot to go in the basement cellar for tide us over thru the fall and into winter.  I dug up one of the 3 sweet potato hills - we planted 3 different varieties.  The one I dug up today is called Beauregard.  Holy cow were they big and lots of them!!  I created the hills with 1/2 dirt and 1/2 with bags of compost from Price Farms Organics - I had bought their bags of compost for the 1st time this Spring and I will definitely buy more!  I have the potatoes on an old window screen to cure.  The sweet potatoes will have to cure for a few weeks in warm temps,  the normal potatoes I was just wanting the dirt on them to dry off so I can clean them up before I take them inside.  I read not to wash your potatoes till you use them as getting them wet can lead to them getting moldy/rot.

So tonight we plan on cooking out on the grill.  I have 2 cobs of corn we didn't husk to grill, as well as peppers (we grill with feta cheese in them) and some of the fresh potatoes... making me hungry now!

Tomorrow I'm gonna work on picking all the soy/edamame beans as well as the pole green beans.  Hoping to get some room to till up an area to plant fall crops.  

Hope everyone is having a great weekend!  Enjoy this beautiful weather!!

Our Bike Ride to the Farmers Market

So Mo has been training for the Cancer Fundraising bike ride she is participating in thru OSU called the Pelotonia.  She has a goal of raising $1200 and every cent goes right to the cancer research foundation there at OSU.  If anyone is interested in donating to Mo's ride, click here to get to her ride profile page.

This weekend she wanted to go to the farmers market in town at the county fairgrounds which according to google maps is 10miles from our house.  So there was a chance of rain schedule for Sat during the day so I told her since the market opens at 9, how about we ride our bikes there and she kills 2 birds with one stone and it will be some nice time spent together.   So we left this morning around 8ish and we ride and ride, and I've come to notice you really don't pay attention to how many hills are on your road till your riding on a bike!!  We didn't want to get on the main road (67) due to the traffic.  So we took the back way up to Rt 53 and then into town.  While on 53 we started to come up to this awesome looking garden with a small green house behind it, 2 guys were out in the garden and I yelled out "You have an awesome garden" and they had sunflowers all along the front so Mo commented on how she loved those as well.  Then we see the sign "Pahl's Farmers Market  Open Mon-Sat 9-6"  Really?!?!  There is a daily farmers market about 5 miles from our house and we had no idea!!?!!  We only know about the one sponsored at the fair grounds which isn't all that super duper... but its nice the county puts it on.

So we keep riding and we almost are in town and I yell out to Mo "Do you know where we are yet?" to see if she figured out her surroundings...   She thought I was giving her directions on where to turn - she was in front.  She went to slow down / stop and hit a patch of fine gravel and BAM.... down she went.  THANK GOD she had her good bikers gloves on that have the gel padding in them or her hands would have been torn to shreds as she landed on her palms.... her one knee got scraped up pretty badly as well.  A nice guy was mowing and he stopped the mower and came over to see if she needed anything, she had a 'wet-one' towellete in her bag she she cleaned up her knee and thought she would be ok.  We kind of stood around for a bit making sure Mo and the bike was ok. There was a storage facility next to the house where the guy was mowing...  the older man from the storage place comes rolling down in his golf cart also making sure we are ok, he said he bikes from Marion to Upper so he must be in good shape - he looked to be 65-70 yrs old.

So we started to keep on traveling, we had to go all the way thru town to get to the fair grounds.  Mo said her bike didn't seem right...  So we stopped at Buds Bike shop - which we have passed many times going home from MJ Mugsys....and always said we have to check it out sometime...  so today was the day.  Bud was very nice and knowledgeable.  He looked at the gears and said that nothing was out of whack.  Him & Mo started talking bike talk, she was telling him about her road bike she has (she was riding her hybrid)...  I don't know the "lingo" - all I know is my bike has 2 wheels, some gears, a chain and some brakes.  =) 

We head out of the bike shop and down to the fairgrounds.  Mo bought some honey from a local bee keeper who we had bought from before - we talked to the husband last time we bought it - this time it was the wife and I realized I knew her, it was the mom of one of the girls that Jake (my ex's son) used to hang out with in 4H.  So I talked to them for a while and we got some info from the OSU Extension office table about preserving/canning food.  We talked to one of the women who had the largest supply of produce there - they were from the Pahl farm we passed. 

We headed home and this time we stopped at the Pahl's Farmers Market.  The husband (about my age I think) showed us around the place.  Ends up the farm there is his dads or father in laws (I forget) and they are now running it, but that they live just down the road from us!  He said "didn't you buy Martin Thiel's house?"  I was shocked... he must have recognized me from being out in the yard working when he drove past.  When he said they have the Belgian draft horses I knew exactly which house it was!  We were chit chatting and we said about having the goats but they aren't the lawn mowers we thought they would be and that I had actually thought about contacting them to bring down a horse.  He said he might have a cow that would work...  So not sure if he was serious but who knows maybe one day we will have a cow out there as well on loan. 

Entire way back we were trying to figure out what was making the noise on Mo's bike - we think we figured it out - chain rubbing on something in the front gear area.  After Mo got home she called up the bike store to see if she could take it out there.  She is so mad at herself for trying to stop where the gravel was and dumping the bike.  Worst part is she just had an entire tuneup done on it last week at a bike store in C-bus where she originally bought it. Her bike race is a week from today so she needs it to be good to go.  

We had a great time biking together and I think Mo is really enjoying biking again.  I asked her if this is something she wants to keep doing after the race is over and she said definitely yes. I was glad to hear that - it will be something very healthy we can do together.  I know I can certainly use some more exercise.  Just wish it was something we could do all year long.  Oh and I think I made more work for myself today, just seemed like I had to give a lot more to keep going....  came home and checked my tire pressure.  Supposed to be 40-65psi.  Mine was 20.   So next ride shouldn't be as hard... duh! 

So that was our Saturday morning.... 25.45miles of it!

Vineyard Tour on Vacation

We went up to Geneva with Mo's family again this year.  The cottage was torn down and rebuilt and is now like 3 times bigger and so nice!  The cottage is just like 5 or so houses down from the Old Firehouse Winery so we would always go there every year.  This year we wanted to go more inland and see the majority of the other wineries available there in Grand River Valley area. We did this over 2 days.  We mainly just did tastings at each since we were driving, the last day we actually enjoyed full glasses.  We stayed at some longer than others, some had A/C  others did not. 

The 1st one we went that was open was South River.  This is a church that was moved 50 miles from its original location when it was going to be demolished to build a convenience store in its location.  The vineyard owner and group of Amish men dismantled the church board by board and rebuilt it at the vineyard.  This was one of our FAV wineries for the building, the outdoor area, etc.   We purchased a bottle of their Riesling there.

2 that we sampled.

Yeah like I wasn't gonna take a photo of those!

Mo enjoying the shade... it was HOT out.

I thought steeple top was cool.

 The next one was just right down the road.  This one seemed the most touristy that we went to, but it did have A/C and the person at the sampling table was one of the owners or something, she knew a lot about the wine process and I was able to ask a lot of questions about growing the grapes, diseases, etc.  She even gave me the contact person at OARDC who is their go to on grapes!  They put in a video for us to watch to show how the harvester machinery picks the grapes and the wind machines.  She told us due to the elevations of the land - some pockets are more prone to frost and that they burn huge bales of hay/straw and use the wind machines to blow the warmed are over top of the vineyard to keep the frost from killing the grape vines.  Was a very interesting conversation at DeBonne Vineyard.  They also started a brewery there as well and had a glass cutout in the floor that you could see down to the brewery.    This was my most education stop along our tour.  We purchased a bottle of their Jazz White (blend of 76% Chardonnay, 12% Riesling, 12% Pinot Grigio).

The next stop was at the Grand River Cellars which we found out at the previous winery that it is owned by the Debonne winery.  We decided to eat lunch at this one, and the food was awesome.  We did another tasting tray.  Nothing jumped out at us at this one, so we didn't buy any bottles.  No air either so it was a bit humid.  The overall look of the place was really nice - especially on the outside.  The part that made this stop memorable was the 3 old Italian men who sat down by us at the bar.  Barmaid warned us they were coming, the make their rounds every Friday and they can get loud.  They were fighting on who paid, who could drink more (who was driving), etc.  Half of what they said I couldn't even make out...  barmaid even had problems.  She said they never stop arguing about the same thing every week.  I want to go to the wineries every week with my friends when I'm in my 80's too!!  =)

We tried to stop next door at St Joseph on Friday as well, it said opened at 3pm which is when we went, but no one there - also noted they had a new building on another road.  We hit that one the following day.

 

We actually went to the last one 1st, but they were not open yet, so we figured we would go on the way back to the cottage.  Another one of our favs.  We tried 4 I think but decided up buying a bottle of their Gewurztraminer.  We love saying the name of that one, and tried it at many of the wineries, becoming one of our favorite whites.  Laurello's vineyards are right off the road as you drive to it.  We stopped and took a photo of them.   Seeing all the acres upon acres of vineyards really makes me want to plant my entire back property with grapes!!!!  

Would LOVE to actually get to tour their wine making facilities!

Here is one of the wind machines to help keep frost from forming.

Next 2 visits were on Sat.  The 1st was the Harpersfield winery.  The was also one of our favs - it sits way back off the road and the buildings are very old school.  We tried a few samples and decided on a glass of their Gewurztraminer.  They have their 2 family dogs there (short & long hair Jack Russel terriers).  The inside of the tasting room has photos and paintings of them.  They run around, have a water bowl outside on the deck and gets lots of petting from all the visitors.  I love the photo I got of the one as he just got done rolling under one of the bushes. 

Saying this is what I want in my back yard!!

Had Mo hold her glass funny to show off her Hello Kitty band-aids
from her batting cage wounds the night before. 
Bad grips and no batting gloves is bad combo!

Enjoyed wonderful company (Mo), great glass of wine,
and a little shade and breeze.  Perfect!

Ahhh nothing like a good roll in the dirt to cool ya off!

Notice dog bowl...

The last winery we went to was St Joseph's other newer building.  The had the air on there and a musician was just about to start as we got there.  Wasn't much as far as coolness goes for the looks of place.  We tasted 2 wines and decided on a glass of Riesling there. Our 2 glasses were completely different in size but she poured them the same - mine was wider so since I was driving I switched with Mo for the less alcohol.   We got a cheese and cracker plate and did some people watching and just talked about wine and what our evening plans were.... (which would be RAIN...again!).