Emerging from deep within my psyche, an idea came forth the other day that intrigued me, but also caught me a little off guard. The question I was mulling over was how best to cope with the overabundance of jalapeno peppers now gracing my garden. I tried giving a few chilies to a friend who was visiting the other day. A white woman, she acted as if I were offering her plutonium. No matter that I assured her that if she striped away the seeds and the membranes, she would find that my little red jalapenos were quite sedate. Politely, she left my house with one pepper -- one. I have dozens and dozens of beautiful, red jalapenos on my hands.Should I attempt to dry them? Do they freeze well? Or should I quietly move in a rogue direction and toss 50 percent of them into the compost bin, pretending they never existed.
As I weighed my options, I thought of my foremothers. What did they do with prolific crop production? On my paternal side, where the family roots are deep in Ohio, I pictured an ancestral home where the basement was lined with jars of string beans, rhubarb and pickles. In all honestly, I don't know if this picture is an accurate one. I've never been to Ohio, except for the time when my plane made an emergency landing in Columbus, but that's another story.
On my maternal side, the Italian side, food waste was definitely discouraged and edged right up against committing actual sin. In my grandmother's kitchen, excess and over-ripened produce found its way into pots boiling on the stove. I watched many times as she transformed strawberries, or plums, or oranges into jellies, jams and marmalades. My mother, too, will put up some jam if she finds herself with too much of a particular fruit.
Was this the answer, then? Could my jalapenos follow a similar path? Could I find a righteousness solution by whipping up a jalapeno jelly? True, I had never preserved before, but I assumed that I carried the canning gene. Yes, the product was odd, but not unheard of. As I said, I was intrigued by this idea, but also a little startled by it. I felt that perhaps I was reaching for some generational link to my past. Then I did something my foremothers certainly never did. I went to http://www.williams-sonoma.com/ and typed "jalapeno" into the search engine. A recipe for a jelly that combined jalapenos and red peppers quickly popped up.
If Williams-Sonoma was on board, my notion no longer seemed so wacky. Now, my jalapeno jelly project was officially afoot. Next stop was the kitchen section of my hardware store for some Ball jars and pectin. While I had never made jelly before, I knew the steps. However, to guard against a kitchen disaster triggered by my noviceness, I invited my mother, who as I mentioned, had jammed and jellied many times before, to join in the festivities.
Inviting Mama Mia turned out to be a good idea, because she definitely added value. First she brought cheesecloth, a tool the recipe never mentioned, which we used in the straining step. Second, she advised me to cook the jalapenos and peppers in the tallest pot I owned in order to avoid a very messy boil-over situation. You'd be amazed at how high the jelly mixture bubbles up in the pot. I'd still be cleaning red syrupy goo off my stove if not for the tallest pot tip.
Anyway, the project was both great fun and a technical success. The mixture congealed, and I now have eight gorgeous jars of pepper jelly. The color is hard to describe -- a red, orange, pink hue, reminiscent of a sunset. But despite the stunning color, my jalapeno byproduct is still generating fear. Last night, I opened a jar to taste it, spreading some jelly on a plain cracker. Dennis, Nick and his friend, Paola, looked at me quizzically, waiting to see if I would bounce out of my seat to douse a five-alarm fire in my mouth. No such reaction. Despite the fact that each jar probably contains one whole jalapeno, the jelly is sweet, but not hot. It has the essence of jalapeno, without the burn. I managed to get all three of them to taste it, and they all acknowledged that the jelly was not hot, as they had assumed. Still, I don't see Nick reaching for a peanut butter and jalapeno jelly sandwich anytime soon.
So, I plan to give my jelly products away as holiday gifts, but only to those with brave and adventurous palettes. Of course, I still have many, many peppers on the plants. For his part, Dennis keeps asking me to secure a mortar and pestle, because he thinks he can grind the chilies into powder. I'm tempted to get him the equipment, just to see how far he'll go with this plan.
I have another idea. The Latino workers who installed my patio in the summer, the same men who actually planted the jalapenos in my yard, are returning this week to finish our landscaping. My guess is that these men will gratefully accept any peppers I'm willing to part with. I can see now that sharing the bounty with those who know how to salsa is actually the righteous solution.
