Post Produce: Peppers!

I'm going to spare you all the highly, excessively alliterative content I considered including in this post. Suffice it to say I'm dealing with a plethora of peppers as I participate in my first Post Produce. A couple days ago I finally called the pepper harvest over and harvested every last one of them. We may have some sunny days but it's going to stay cold and the chances of many more of them growing appreciably or even ripening are pretty slim. I selected a good quantity for freezing and then, faced with this abundance I decided it was time to try pickling some.


The first recipe I used was the basic one for hot peppers in the Ball Blue Book Guide to Preserving. It's a simple solution of vinegar and water flavored with garlic. I mixed it up by using different peppers, treatments and additional vegetables. Some recipes I had looked at called for blistering and peeling the peppers first so I did that with the largest of the remaining Chervena Chushkas. These are so good this way I may have to pressure can some next year so I have them for making muhummara. For now the commercial bottled ones will have to do.


In the end I had eight pints. Three are straight, whole jalapenos, two are the roasted sweet peppers with some carrots added to one jar, two are green Italian frying peppers with celery in one and onion in the other and the last jar is plain Ancho Gigantea--none of which were actually gigantic.


With these done and out of the way I'm still left with quite a few more green Chervena Chushka peppers. For these I'll use Ball's "Pickled Pepper Mix" recipe. This version calls for slitting and brining the peppers for twelve to eighteen hours so I'm timing that process so that I can do the actual pickling tomorrow morning.


Now my only question is how we're going to eat all these pickled peppers?!