Port Potager

In addition to a strong harvest of chicken heart hot peppers , we’re also enjoying a bumper crop of poblanos: (This isn’t even all of them.) These did really well for us this year, and we’ve been using them instead of bell peppers in our recipes all summer and fall. We had to bring them all in this week since we had a frost warning, though, so now we have piles of peppers to use. They’ll last for a while at room temperature, since they’re fairly tough, but to make sure we don’t lose any, we’ll have to roast and freeze them: These have been roasted in the broiler to char the skins. (They probably could be even blacker next time.) Once charred, you let them steam in a bag and then peel off the skins. Once prepped in the way, we can stack them in a freezer box and use them all winter long in recipes.  I used these four to make chiles rellenos. Since I am lazy, I didn’t batter and fry them, though. Instead, I put the cheese-stuffed peppers in a baking dish...

This year we planted a different variety of hot pepper: hinkelhatz. Hinkelhatz is German for "chicken heart," which describes the approximate shape and size of these peppers when they are ripe. The plants are prolific, and last weekend I harvested plenty from our second round of picking: The hinkelhatz are the small ones on the left; the big ones on the right are poblanos, which also did extremely well for us this year.  The first round of hinkelhatz peppers were sliced and pickled like jalapeños , and we plan to enjoy them on nachos all winter long. (Hopefully they’re not too spicy for that application — these are supposed to be several times hotter than jalapeños, but we’ve had such extremely spicy jalapeños in the past that I think we can handle it.) Now that we have a second batch, I blitzed that whole basket of mixed hot peppers above to make a new batch of homemade sriracha . We did this for the first time back in 2013, and it lasted pretty much fo...