Peeling chiles is a PITA.
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Here are the new ones. I thought they’d be on a roll, but they’re on sheets. I used to use labels that came with the canning jars, which you stuck on the face of the jars. A real pain to remove when te-using the jars.
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Oh so true! We had a grocery store in town where once a year they’d have a Hatch Chile promotion, and you could buy boxes of them, which they roasted on site. I think two years in a row we got 20. -30 pounds of them. When we got them home, we’d spend most of the day outside, peeling and de-seeding them for storage in the freezer. It took 2 of us about 4-6 hours total for that process. I didn’t wear gloves the 1st time, and omg, my poor hands throbbed for days. Really stupid!! But now I keep a box of disposable gloves when I deal with them. Sadly the store left town, and as well, the store chain stopped featuring those events. But we can buy them fresh from the supermarkets, at least, happily, but they’re seasonal.
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It’s excellent!
The recipe or the cook book? Just… about…to …click!
Ball does make dissolvable labels that wash off jars easily.
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Good to know - I wasn’t aware.
I finally had a chance to try Catherine’s Pickled Blueberries with some goat cheese on a cracker. It was (as promised in the recipe) delicious! I’ll be making this again next year.
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Not quite yet a canning project (yet), but the start of one. I ran about 10# of garden tomatoes through the steam juicer. I’ll use the resulting broth for thinning my roasted tomato puree (which I will can). Any extra to be frozen and used for red rice and/or soup base.
For inquiring minds: the juice itself can be water-bath canned (I’ve done it), but the acidity is so low, it requires a lot of lemon juice to set the PH level straight, which I feel throws the flavor off. I prefer to freeze.
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I really often wish I had more than a small fridge-top freezer (and it is small, because the fridge is), but unfortunately, there is no place for a freestanding one.
I hear you. We’re very fortunate to have three, although the outside one kicks out now and then and requires monitoring. With our penchant to go charter fishing, we needed one just to hold the fish (but not in that outside one)!
Yeah, no space in the house proper, no garage here, and the one-room basement (just under the kitchen, the rest is crawl space) is prone to dampness and in fact floods without a working sump pump. And I live in a large urban area, so I can’t imagine an outdoor one (which would have to be locked just to keep it safe from prowling raccoons, at the least).
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Ha ha! The outdoor one is wrapped in a tarp (to keep off the sun) and piled with bricks (to keep out the critters). Not the most user friendly, but it does the job. 
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tell me how you can roasted tomato puree, pls.
in my tiny bklyn apt, i had a chest freezer. i was prepared to use it as a TV stand if need be…
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Here’s my method: roasted tomato puree, with a minor correction here.
I love having a stash of this around. As I’m down to the last couple of jars in the pantry, my goal this fall is to put up as much of this as I have tomatoes for. It works well for for soups and pasta sauces, and is a great time saver when the mood strikes.
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both!!
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A test jar of Rick Bayless’s habanero pepper sauce. DH is the resident scovillian at our house, and made this sample just in case our serrano peppers don’t come in this fall (we are still waiting for them to break color).
This is a good sauce! He did not thin the vinegar with water and I’m glad he didn’t. I like the kick, and the cider vinegar was a good choice. He also strained it, resulting in a very smooth sauce.
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What a glorious colour!
The recipe called for a carrot, which (personally) I think was in there for the color. Also, DH swapped out a bit of the habanero for red pepperoncini, for purposes of a) cutting the heat a bit, and 2) adding color. It’s a very flexible recipe as far as type and mix of peppers.
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