The garden has been crazily productive this year! It seems we have a Jack in the Beanstock garden or a vegetarian version of the golden goose.
I finished the last canning project, which was 6 pints of monastery sauce. The overflow raspberries are frozen, and some made into ice cream yesterday - yum. I will probably make some chokecherry syrup/jelly closer to Christmas from some dried berries I ordered, that I’ll reconstitute before using. We should have some empty canning jars by then - canning supplies are pretty sparse at this point. But I have a lot of citric acid lol.
Quite a few from previous pickings got dried and ground into a powder. I think these might go into a vinegar based hot pepper sauce. Do you have any ideas about that or a recipe for something like that? I know you are quite the experimenter!
Have you seen this thread about fermented hot sauce? I’ve got a couple (mostly Scotch Bonnets and Aji Amarillo)of ferments going and will probably use the Serious Eats fermented pepper sauce idea. I believe there’s at least one vinegar recipe there too. Here’s another, but I I have not tried it.
I’m impressed you can get blackberries at the FM in late October on the east coast. They are long gone from our local markets in Northern CA, but we don’t have greenhouse grown.
Today’s pickings: tomatillos will be frozen, possibly raspberries too. Green beans (added to some previously picked) for vegetable at dinner. (Chicken Marsala)
It’s similarly simple, but no grinding of any sort (I’m very careful with ghost peppers after my friend got burn blisters just from touching some that were overripe and oozed a bit – and she grew up with them).
Onion, tomato, ginger, garlic as the base, 1 whole dried naga chilli / ghost pepper, a cabbage cut into large chunks or quartered if small, place big chunks or a pork roast on top of that, add water to braise, cover, and cook on a very low heat till the pork is tender, occasionally checking the liquid and pouring the sauce over various bits. You can add potato towards the end, it absorbs the flavors nicely.
If your heat tolerance is high, you can add 2 or 3 chillies (my friends do), but I almost always use 1 because then I can taste the fruity flavor of the chilli in addition to the slight burn, but the burn doesn’t drown out the actual flavor, which is unusual and lovely.
Bamboo shoot is the traditional vegetable, but it’s not easily available away from the source. Mustard greens or other sturdy greens work too, but cabbage is more compact.
You can also use chicken thighs instead of pork.
Eat with rice.
(One chilli in a jar of oil or vinegar or honey infuses slowly but deliciously for a condiment instead of a direct use.)
