Peter Piper Lives Here

A little over a week ago we had our first light frost, and I had to bring in all of our peppers. There were tons! (Okay, there were many pounds.) Instead of eating them green, we kept waiting for the them to ripen into their pretty colors. But when frost beat us to it, I had to bring in a lot all at once. Many of them have ripened to yellow and red on the counter, and we've been eating then just as fast as we can. Best use so far:


Kirk made these excellent stuffed peppers in the crock pot. They are filled with rice, spicy Italian sausage, a bit of egg to hold it all together, and (of course) some more peppers. They were cooked in plain tomato sauce in the crock pot for several hours, and the result was really delicious. I think Kirk scooped up the remaining roasted pepper-flavored sauce to use later on some other Italian delight.

Another major portion of the pepper harvest was our jalapeños and serranos:


Kirk spent the evening last night slicing and dicing to pickle these hot peppers for the winter. We ended up with seven pretty pint jars of sliced jalapeños. They aren't super spicy because our peppers this year were disappointingly mild. We still have a whole pile of serranos left, and those are somewhat hotter. Kirk is thinking of pickling those whole. We could also string them up and dry them.


What exactly does one do with seven pints of pickled jalapeños? For starters, we had jalapeño bacon pizza for dinner tonight! We'll also go through many more with all the trays of nachos we eat around here.

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