While Punxsutawney Phil and the meteorologists work out their differing predictions for the end of winter, growers are already hard at work preparing for spring, summer and fall.January plant starts included cabbage,
chili peppers, bell peppers and rosemary.
Now that February has begun, the seed starting kicks into high gear with oregano, collards and lots and lots of tomatoes with 8 varieties and a total of 38 plants this year!
The new starts will welcome roommates in my growing nook for the cilantro and basil I grow indoors each winter. I purchased inexpensive shop lights, metal wire shelving units and florescent tubes 5 years ago so I never have to go a grey winter day without their bright colors and fresh flavors complimenting meals.
The minimal, initial investment for the equipment has more than paid for itself already and now as my garden diversifies and the number of indoor starts continue to expand each year with no additional infrastructure costs to date, I consider this money extremely well spent.Happy Spring, whenever it comes :)
Quest For Fire
My tomatoes were troopers this year holding onto green romas, blue beauties and red delicious globes into early November, but I gave up and pulled the remainders two weeks ago just so I could begin cleaning the beds and preparing them for winter before heading off to a week's worth of meeting in San Diego last week.This weekend's task was to pull the rest of the serranos off before 3 consecutive nights of freezing or below temperatures hit them. My final harvest ended up being 1lb, 5oz of beautiful peppers that will warm dishes from now until next year. All were cleaned and vaccu-sealed before being frozen except for a few that will go into the Thanksgiving cornbread later this week.
On another pepper note, a friend has some seeds that he will be sharing with me from his home country of El Salvador. I am keenly interested in growing them out next year since he doesn't know the name of them in either his native tongue or English. For now I am thinking of them as Mystery Pepper and what a fun mystery to solve!
Variations On A Theme - Potato Leek Soup
My favorite recipes are the ones that resemble a good canvas - a delicious backdrop that can be accentuated and modified by what is in season and/or on hand. Having just finished a post about an overabundance of serrano peppers, I wanted to do a variation on a fall favorite - potato leek soup.This year's leeks are on the thin side which I attribute to my north facing backyard garden, so I harvested roughly 3x the number I would normally use for this recipe.
I decided to add some kick to the background canvas and finely chopped 4 roasted red serranos from my freezer and fresh oregano.
On it's own, this soup is mild but hearty making it a perfect backdrop for any number of flavor profiles.
The genius of this soup is the mandolin sliced potatoes.
Once cooked through and gently mashed, they thicken the stock and the mashing breaks the potatoes into bite-sized pieces.
Add a little cream and cook on low for a few more minutes and voila!
A delicious meal that varies depending on preferences and additions!
Cooking with Wilbur Scoville
My 3 serrano plants have produced so abundantly this year that even after freezing enough raw and roasted peppers to last until next year's harvest, giving away dozens more to friends and co-workers and drying many more to save seed, I am still drowning in the spicy, delicious peppers.I first learned the distinctive flavor and heat of these peppers back in 2010 after searching and trying one of those 'top secret restaurant recipes revealed' sites for the Chipotle guacamole recipe*. As soon as knife met serrano the unmistakable scent that I associated with Chipotle guac filled the air and I was sold on serranos and I have been growing them since.Serranos are a type of chili pepper that fits on the Scoville scale between between the less spicy jalapenos and the more spicy cayenne peppers. The Scoville chart has its shortcomings, but it is the closest thing to an authoritative ranking of spiciness of chiles that is in culinary use.What I like about serranos is that they have a taste, not just heat, so they add an actual flavor layer to dishes made with them, not just spiciness. I have not been able to find a chart on chili peppers and umami but my taste buds tell me serranos have it.
So as much as I love serranos, the still going bumper crop of this year's harvest has presented the challenge of what to do with all of these serranos!Drying ripe, red chiles to save seed made me wonder what the ubiquitous crushed red pepper flakes in my spice jars were made of. A bit of research later and I found that crushed (or dried) red pepper flakes are the result of red chiles, but can be made of a blend or different types and are usually not labeled with the type(s) of chiles inside and are generally blends of several types of peppers.Back in September I decided to gamble some of my over abundance on an experiment and dried about 10 fully red serranos and popped them into the food processor, seeds and all. The seeds are generally believed to convey even more heat to the dishes they are added to than the fruit body so most recipes specify that the seeds should be removed. But the crushed red pepper flakes I have seen always have visible seeds so I left them in.
The experiment in making my own crushed red pepper flakes was a huge success! They definitely add the spicy kick that I am accustomed to with the store bought spice and my serrrano-only version is also adding the flavor and body that I associate with serranos.I am drying a second round of serranos to grind into spice mostly because I have to do something with them and I am beginning to think they might make spicy stocking stuffers :)*Interesting side note - the "official" recipe on the Chipotle website calls for jalapenos and is a possible red herring so that the made-at-home version does not taste quite as good as the restaurant version.