Preserving with Dr. Monkey (or Pickling my way on the shining path to culinary freedom here in my urban homestead)

Today's episode: pickled jalapenos with garlic.

I've been wanting to try pickling ever since I bought that food preservation book the other day, so when I noticed a local grocery store had big ol' fat jalapenos on sale for .99 a pound, I sprang into action. The recipe for pickling chili peppers in the book said it would make 4 pints of finished product, and I've learned the hard way it's always better to have more sterilized jars ready if and when you need them, I put 7 jars and lids in my water bath canner pot and filled it with water and left it to boil.

Next I washed and laid out my peppers:

I like the heat from jalapenos but I'm not crazy about heat that overwhelms everything else, so I de-seeded and I cut out most of the ribs from the peppers. Then I sliced them lengthwise:
Next up I peeled and sliced about 8 medium sized cloves of garlic:
My jars had been in the sterilizing water bath for about 25 minutes so I put my pickling solution on to boil. This solution is three cups of distilled white vinegar, two cups water, 2 tablespoons of sugar, two tablespoons of salt (and I used canning and pickling salt which I bought last year to use in my canned tomatoes and my homemade canned tomato sauce).
When the pickling solution (aka brine) came to a boil I took it off the burner. I then took my jars and lids out of the boiling water bath and I filled up as many jars with pepper and garlic slices as I could. Then I ladled the brine over them making sure that the contents of each jar was covered by the brine. Then I put lids on the jars and I tightened them and put them back into the water bath for fifteen minutes. When that fifteen minutes was up I let them sit for five more minutes in the water after I took the pot off the burner.

And here's what my finished product looks like:
As you can see I only got three jars out of two pounds of peppers. I could have gotten more if I had not de-seeded the peppers I guess. But the recipe does say to pack whatever you're pickling tightly into your jars and to then pour the brine in.

Next time I do this I'll cut de-seed the peppers but I won't cut them in to the long thin strips, I'll cut them into rings. I'll also use three or four pounds of peppers, or perhaps more, and I'll adjust the brine solution accordingly. Actually what I'll do is I'll double the brine solution and cut up about eight to nine pounds of peppers.

The book says to let whatever you pickle stay in the sealed jar for at least two weeks, so in a few weeks I'll open a jar and let you know what these peppers taste like.

Preserving with Dr. Monkey

We've got a bumper crop of figs on the fig tree outside our house and they are ripening faster than Harry Reid can capitulate to the Republican minority in the US Senate, so I've begun making fig preserves. Here's what I did with the latest batch of ripe figs:

I washed and sliced them into halves and quarters. I ended up with 4 cups of figs. The recipe I use, which I got from a magazine called Mary Jane's Farm, calls for 1/4 of water and 1/2 cup of sugar per cup of figs, so I put one cup of water in my big pot and then I added 2 cups of sugar, and I used the dark brown 'raw' sugar this time, although I usually use plain old white sugar.
I brought the sugar and water mixture up to near boiling and then I added half the figs. I let then simmer in the sugar water for 20 minutes.
Then I added the other half of the figs and a pint of blueberries, I added the blueberries because I wanted to experiment with adding different flavors and fruits to the figs in an effort to find the best flavor combination. I let the figs and berries simmer for another 20 minutes.

While they simmered I took the zest from two lemons and the juice of one and a half of them and I added it to the figs and berries. The acid from the lemons helps preserve the fig mixture and it gives the flavor a little kick.
After my figs and berries finished cooking I put the whole shebang in the food processor and I pulsed it until everything was all chopped up and mixed together nicely. Then I put the hot fig/berry mixture into jars I had sterilized earlier.
I ended up with two smaller jars, those are 10 ounce jars I believe. And one full pint jar. The not quite full pint jar I put in the fridge after it cooled and we'll eat it first. The other jars I can store with the other jam I made earlier this year.

It tasted just fine but the figs over powered the blueberries a bit. However since we do have a booming crop of figs this year, I'll get more chances to experiment with flavors as the summer rolls on. I plan on adding some hot peppers to one batch of fig preserves this year because I love 'sweet heat.'

Coming up next time on 'Preserving With Dr. Monkey' I'll show you how I make and can salsa.