EDITOR’S NOTE (aka words from MOI): In doing a little blog cleanup, I noticed we have 10, count ‘em, 10 out-standing draft posts! They’re just sitting there behind the scenes, collecting dust on their little periods and exclamation points. One of them is this gem, which I wrote out specifically so I could re-create my favorite canning recipe of the past two summers. Read on and savor the mental image of a balmy late-September day, when this post was initially drafted!
In addition to drinking beer in the fall sunshine with friends and hanging with the chickens, I also canned a couple more jars of hot peppers today. Since I talk so much about how freaking amazing they are (and since I’d like to have a good record of the actual recipe I use), here’s the secret recipe. Shhh… don’t tell.
HONEYED HOT PEPPERS OF MAGIC AND DOOM
- 1-1.5 pounds hot green peppers (cayenne, jalapeno work well) or a mix of hot and not-hot
- 3 cups cider vinegar (sometimes I do half and half with white vinegar)
- 1 cup water
- 1 tbpsn kosher salt
- 1 tbpsn honey
- 1 bay leaf per jar
- 1 clove of garlic per jar
- a dash of whole peppercorns per jar
- a dash of whole allspice per jar (if you’ve got ‘em)
Slice peppers into 1/4″ to 1/2″ rounds and set aside. Dissolve honey and salt in vinegar and water and bring just to a boil. Prepare water bath canner and 1/2-pint jars. Once all is good to go with your canning setup, put 1 clove garlic, 1 bay leaf, dash of peppercorns, and dash of allspice in each jar, stuff with peppers, then ladle vinegar mixture in to 1/2″ headspace. Repeat until all your peppers are gone. Then bring water bath canner to a boil, boil for 10 minutes, let sit for 5 minutes in water bath canner, remove to towel, let sit overnight… then SCARF THEM DOWN.
Yum! Will definitely try this recipe!
In this case, necessity bred deliciousness! My first year gardening, our cayenne pepper plants went gangbusters. I had 225 green cayenne peppers on my six plants in the garden (seriously, I counted them as I harvested them), and our first hard frost threatened to turn them all to mush. I had no idea what to do with green cayenne peppers, but a quick search of my canning recipes yielded a version of this recipe. I figured I might as well try it.
We love these babies so much that not a single cayenne pepper was allowed to fully ripen last year – I just kept canning them using this recipe before they could turn red. YUM.