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New year, new me, blah, blah, Brussels sprouts

Time to get re-revved. I’ve rejoined the YMCA after 6 years away. I can walk on the treadmill, do weight circuits, take water aerobics, spin and zumba classes, swim laps. If only it weren’t so much easier to lie in the recliner, read novels (ooh, like Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior) and eat leftover Christmas candy!

birthdays 030

Birthday girl and fairy godmother.

Christmas around here really isn’t over until our middle daughter’s Groundhog Day birthday. Between Christmas and then we have 3 others — Vlad the Plaid’s, Dora the Explorer’s and middle daughter’s daughter’s — so it seems like a six-week present spree. With presents, of course, come cake and ice cream.

Actually, the best birthday meal we’ve had in forever was Dora’s fairy godmother’s birthday supper for her and Vlad at New Town Bistro in Winston-Salem. This is a modestly priced, pleasant little place our dentist recommended (!) as his and his wife’s go-to restaurant.  The food is consistently good and imaginative (although we still can’t figure out why the apple-chicken sausage with Vlad’s pork tenderloin), and the menu changes just enough to give it an atmosphere of adventure. The desserts are OK, but the emphasis is on meats and fish and vegetables. The basil-sprinkled sweet corn,  thumb-fat stalks of roasted asparagus, tender spring-green slices of fried squash, sautéed mushrooms with the sweet tang of red wine, Brussels sprouts with walnuts.

Now my daughters and I belong to a small but loyal cadre of Brussels sprouts fans. We’ve loved them since before they were trendy, since my mother cooked them only until tender-crunchy and served them only with a dab of mustard and a squirt of lemon juice.

Love sprouts but not cilantro which is in original Food Network recipe. I omitted.

Love sprouts but not cilantro which is in original Food Network recipe. I omitted. Photo: Christopher Testani.

Even before New Town, He Who Does Not Like B.S.  brought in a bag of baby sprouts from his winter garden. They were a pretty jade and closed as tightly as a sleeping newborn’s fists. I X’d their tender stems, sliced them in half and soaked them in salt water to discourage hitchhiking insects, patted them dry and oven-roasted them, using this Food Network magazine recipe. Even He said they were “interesting.”

Roasted garlic Brussels sprouts

Heat 2 tablespoons olive oil in a small skillet over medium heat; add 2 chopped garlic cloves and 1/2 teaspoon each cumin seeds and kosher salt and cook 2 minutes or until fragrant. Stir in 1 tablespoon brown sugar, the juice of 1/2 lemon and a pinch of red pepper flakes. Toss with 1-1/4 pounds halved Brussels sprouts on a baking sheet. Roast at 450 ° until tender, 18 to 24 minutes. Toss every few minutes but not so often you don’t get the little crispy bits which are the best part of this dish.

I can’t tell you how many servings this makes because 3 of us polished it off with seconds. We like our sprouts!

Category:

Brussels sprouts, healthy cooking, Holiday eating, Olive oil, Roasting vegetables, Rural life, vegetables

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Best crockpot potatoes ever

Plug, plug, plug. This is what I do every day. Work at turning eating in a healthy way into a way of life. A lifestyle even. Keep track of my calories. Measure food with scales, cups and spoons. Exercise. Exercise more. Drink quarts and quarts of water. Sleep.

On the plus side my flowers look as good as they’ve ever looked in the almost 23 years we’ve lived up here on our hilltop. On the minus, I’m not much fun, collapsing into my recliner before it gets dark and trudging to bed not long after that!  Today I did my 15 minutes worth of yoga,  rode my newly tuned-up bike for 45, then weeded and clipped irises for two hours. Whew!

This week I’ve also weeded around the rhubarb and realize we probably have some of those lovely red stalks out there now, ready to eat. I’ve picked huge heads of broccoli and found them full of small jade-colored worms that have crawled in to spin their cocoons (a saltwater soak disposes of them most efficiently). I’ve picked lettuce that’s somehow stayed green and crispy in this summer heat (90s today), cleaned up around our two apple trees, pruned 3 gigantic mock orange bushes, several shaggy harlequin glorybower and forsythia bushes. I’ve made an impatiens bed for coral and salmon-colored blossoms and planted 14 basil babies ($2 at Walmart) in the herb bed. I am gardening woman, hear me moan.

The upside here is I lunched on our neighbor Anne Cain’s amazing goat cheese terrine with pesto, sun-dried tomatoes and green olives spread on good garlic crackers. Even with a lime fruit bar (70 calories) for dessert, I still haven’t eaten as many calories as I’ve burned. (Remember, I track calories in and calories out for free on livestrong.com.)

I think I decided (!) yesterday that I’d like to lose 30 more pounds and that it will probably take at least a year, but that’s OK. I don’t want to give up all things tasty, just plan to continue moderating how much I eat. This morning’s breakfast, for instance: One serving of a 277-calorie per serving blackberry cobbler with 1/2 cup of plain Greek yogurt (another 70 calories).

With these potatoes, which were devoured before I remembered to take their picture, I trimmed fat from the recipe (original recipe called for 1 pound bacon, among other mind-boggling extravagances) and ate no more than 1/2 cup per meal, much as I wanted to devour the entire slow cooker-full!

Best crockpot potatoes ever

3 pounds potatoes, peeled and cut into slices, cooked in gently boiling water until done, about 15 minutes

2 ounces Cheddar cheese

3 ounces Parmesan cheese

5 ounces reduced-fat ricotta cheese

5 slices bacon, cooked, drained and crumbled

Salt and pepper to taste

Mix 3 cheeses. Layer in slow cooker with potatoes and bacon crumbles. Cook on low for 3 to 4 hours and try not to eat the whole thing

 

Category:

good food, Rural life, Simple foods, Weight loss

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Baby onions, grown-up onions

Baby onions have stems no bigger than the stick on a Q-tip. The easiest way to slip them to their 1-inch recommended depth is to use a dibble planter with inches marked on it (like the one made for me by my friend Jerry Keys out of poplar wood). Poke a hole to 1 inch, plop in the onion and firm the earth around it. Just make sure that your onions can enjoy all-day sunbathing — I put a few in a shady nook  to see what would happen (and because I was out of onion room) and they haven’t grown a bit, just moped.

Baby onions waiting to go in ground. The established plants in each hill are garlic and leeks.

If your onions do something more productive than mope in the shade, someday you can enjoy this onion tart from the April 2011 issue of Cooking Light.  A rustic crust like this (no pan) is also called a galette. This one is heady with the earthy flavors of roasted onion, feta and Swiss cheese and fresh thyme. My thyme plants are also mopey (or deceased) so I used 2 teaspoons dried thyme instead of 2 tablespoons chopped fresh. The magazine suggested an arugula and walnut salad to accompany since neither of those ingredients will be overpowered by the  onions and cheese.

Onion tart

1 tablespoon olive oil

2-1/2 pounds onions, peeled, trimmed and thinly sliced

2 tablespoons chopped fresh thyme

3/4 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon black pepper

1/2 14.1-ounce package refrigerated pie dough (1 crust)

1/4 cup crumbled reduced-fat feta cheese

1/4 cup shredded reduced-fat Swiss cheese

1 large egg, lightly beaten with 2 tablespoons water

Heat oven to 425º. Heat oil in skillet over medium-high heat. Add onion, thyme, salt and pepper; cook 20 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Roll or stretch out dough on parchment paper-lined baking sheet. Sprinkle feta cheese in center, leaving 1-1/2-inch border; top with onion. Sprinkle with Swiss cheese. Fold piecrust border up and over onion mixture, pleating as you go, leaving a 6-inch-wide opening.

Combine egg and water; brush over dough. Bake at 425º for 25 minutes or until golden. Cool for 10 minutes. Makes 4 servings, 402 calories, 9 g fat each.

Onion galette with the last of our 2011 onion crop.

 

Category:

good food, healthy cooking, Local food, Rural life, Simple foods

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Spring is not for sissies, strawberry crisp

Somehow we associate baby pastels with springtime, yet when I look outside, I see primary colors: The sky, of course, is Carolina (ick, go NC State!) blue and the baby maple leaves, red before they’re green. The intense yellow of the wild mustard and forage turnips, blanketing Iredell pastures as well as the meadowlark breasts turned to the sun as they pinwheel out of the emerald small grains.

Red, red, red is the color of these beautiful berries.

Local strawberries will be here momentarily. In the meantime, someone gave me four pints of foreign ones that actually smelled like ripe berries! I made this simple, wonderful recipe from thebuddingcook.com and, again, wondered why anyone uses red food coloring. You can see how vivid these berries are, and they tasted as good as they look.

Simple strawberry crisp

Fruit: 1 quart strawberry quarters (I hulled and trimmed 2 quarts to get this amount)

1/4 cup sugar

Juice of one lemon

3 tablespoons cornstarch

Pinch of salt

Topping: 2/3 cup all-purpose flour (King Arthur, of course, is there any other?)

1/2 cup packed brown sugar

1/2 cup quick (not instant) oats

1/2 cup chopped walnuts

1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

5 tablespoons melted butter

Pinch of salt

Heat oven to 375°. Mix berries, sugar, lemon, cornstarch and first pinch of salt. Put berry mixture in buttered 8-x-8-inch baking dish.

In bowl you used for mixing fruit, stir together topping ingredients (flour, sugar, oats, walnuts, cinnamon, butter and salt). Spoon over fruit. Bake for 35 to 40 minutes or until crumbs begin to brown and fruit bubbles through topping. Serves 4 to 5 and is ab-fab, served warm and crowned with a scoop of frozen vanilla yogurt.

The young beloved missed the crisp, insisting that they needed to return to school and finish the semester!

Category:

Desserts, Fruit, Rural life, Seasonal food, Simple foods, Spring

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Fiona, split pea soup

“…I think if you have the expectation that you’re going to be happy throughout your life — more to the point, if you have a need to be comfortable all the time — well, among other things, you have the makings of a classic drug addict or alcoholic.” From Wishful Drinking by Carrie Fisher (Simon & Schuster, 2008).

Or a classic fat person.

Feeling tired and anxious today, uneasy in my skin, certain that a fistful of peanut M&Ms would make me feel “better.” Bought a box of cereal instead and measured out one cup, looking across the street as I pulled out of the grocery parking lot at a leaf raker with her enormous bottom stretching out defeated-looking sweatpants.

I’ll admit it: Along with feeling good about my choice, for just a nanosecond I felt a nasty twinge of moral superiority. The next twinge must have been compassion for how hard it probably is for that tubby woman to go about her day. I was that tubby woman, only a year ago, and I know how little I got done between “rests.” Among other things, I have back the full use of my right hand, now that I’m not playing computer solitaire a couple hours a day.

I’m cooking for our Wild Women in the (Tennessee) Woods Weekend coming up and for Thanksgiving as well. I groaned and moaned about it but I rode my bike for an hour today and did some groundwork with the new horse possibility.

Fiona's funny face

Fiona (that’ll be her name if she stays) is the bright rust of oak leaves between the first bits of frost and the first whammo-everything- collapses killing frost. When I brush her in the sunlight, her red hairs are as iridescent as a hummingbird’s optically illusory feathers.

We still make each other nervous, but I did find out she likes me singing in Latin while I groom her. In the ring on a leadline she blows and spins whether the Silly Boys are away from the fenceline or next to it. She’s not afraid of them so what’s the problem? This morning was better except she still thinks it’s her right to headbutt me.

On Saturday she’ll have been here for two weeks, and I haven’t decided yet if we’re going to be a team or not. She’s a warmblood, about 16 h (64 inches at her withers or shoulder blades). Do I want a coldblood (draft), something shorter or do I want to hang up my spurs?

I want to get to our cabin in the Smokies, build a fire and drink cocoa. Or a mug of this split pea soup. I’ve made two batches in the past week — one with a country ham hock for Tennessee and one vegetarian for our college student’s Thanksgiving visit. If you add ham to this Betty Crocker More Slow Cooker Recipes (Wiley Publishing, Inc., 2004), you might want to halve the salt. You can substitute butternut squash for the sweetpotato. The only must is good fresh garlic (not from a jar) and fresh — not dried — dill. I was surprised and delighted when He Who Is Holding Down the Home Fort this weekend told me we have a patch of volunteer dill. That probably means potato salad for

Winter dill is thicker and shorter than warm-weather herb.

Thanksgiving, too.

Creamy split pea soup

2 cups dried green split peas, sorted and rinsed

6 cups water or low-sodium broth

1/2 cup dry sherry or apple juice

1 large dark-orange sweet potato, peeled and cubed (2 cups)

1 large onion, chopped (1 cup)

4 cloves garlic, finely chopped

2 teaspoons salt

3 cups chopped fresh spinach leaves (I’ve also used chard)

1 cup heavy whipping cream

2 tablespoons chopped fresh dillweed

Freshly ground pepper to taste

Mix split peas, water or broth, sherry or juice, sweetpotato, onion, garlic and salt in slow cooker. Cook on high with lid off for 2 hours and then, covered, on low for about 5 hours (your slow cooker may need different timing than my persnickety one) or until peas and other vegetables are tender.

Stir in spinach, cream and dill. Cover and cook on low for another 30 minutes or until spinach wilts. Season with pepper. Eight really good bowls of soup, 235 calories, 10 fat grams each.

Fog rising from "hollers" behind house.

 

Category:

good food, healthy cooking, Rural life, Seasonal food, Soup, vegetables, Weight loss

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Tryout, blowout

Some people drink when they’re nervous or pump themselves up with drugs. Some people just face their fears (imagine!). I ate malted milk Whoppers until I felt sick. Then I got up this morning and went outside and tried the new mare.

She’s a 13-year-old quarterhorse, 16 hands tall and built like a supermodel, which means she’s mostly long, long legs. I think she’s probably as sweet a girl as Louanne, her custodian for the past 4 years, said on Saturday when we picked her up.

But we brought her  to a strange place with two silly geldings about  her age and one 33-year-old who wants to show he’s still in the game. We saw him sneak up behind her this morning when I was petting her. If you don’t think a 33-year-old 1,000-pound horse can sneak, you don’t know our Matt Dillon. It’s hard to be sweet when a set of horse choppers approaches your flank.

Louanne was a volunteer with the NC chapter of the U.S. Equine Rescue League when this mare was found, abandoned, tied up(!) and starving to death. To this day, apparently, she is very concerned about her chow which only makes sense. However, horses concerned about chow can be tricky, even dangerous, at feeding time, especially with other, unfamiliar horses nearby.

So lots of stuff was whirling about my echoing brain last night, knowing that we’d be going for our first test ride this morning. That’s when I fell. Hard. About 500 calories worth would be a conservative guesstimate.

 Luckily, today’s a gorgeous day, sapphire sky unbroken by clouds and only a slightly lighter blue at the edges.  I am pretty much afraid of everything having to do with horses but am crazy (literally) about them and determined to keep trail riding for a while longer. I remember how wonderful it felt cantering up the mountain at the Moses Cone home, or even along our fence here, with two horses on the other side racing us to the top. I want to do/feel that again before I quit.

Fleming is this horse’s name, and she is not a done deal. I want to get on her — briefly — every day for the next week or so and walk her around our ring, maybe even trot. He Who Is Not Scared trotted her this morning after she stopped walking with stiff legs like an astronaut who’d just climbed down from the shuttle (we think my saddle may have been pinching her prominent withers or her shoulders).

Crooked blaze makes her mouth look a little Grinchy.

I’ll have to get my inelastic hip flexors in much better shape if she’s staying since she’s at least 4 inches taller than was Belle. Climbing aboard is its own special challenge.

So is facing challenges without a food pacifier, darn, without any pacifier. This is the sort of spine we’re supposed to have within. But inside I’m hollow, like a big, white chocolate Easter bunny with scared eyes.

I can laugh, though, aware that this poor girl is as nervous as I am and probably quite a pussycat (but she’s not my pussycat — yet) and to think, what it must feel like to get on something hot like a racehorse,  an Arab chomping at the bit or poor Hickstead who died yesterday, coming out of the show jumping ring. Without moving, each would feel to me like a raging, bucking bronco.

Maybe on livestrong.com this past week I read someone saying that successful, long-term weight management is not a matter of numbers on the scale but of finding daily actions that  give us a sense of accomplishment. To eat well today after the candy blowout last night, to get on the horse and say to Geronimo, “Turn her loose and let me walk her.”  I have, I did and it’s not even noon yet.

Category:

Exercise, Food courage, Owning horses, Rural life, Why overweight?

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Little House in the Piedmont, fried Oreos and Bambi

My lumberjack with his beech tree

Kind of a Laura Ingalls Wilder weekend with some food adventures thrown in. Paul Bunyan kept working on the huge, old beech that fell near a friend’s deer stand. We cannot afford to heat by propane alone.

He also pulled buckets of peppers before Friday night’s scattered frost. While I picked basil to make one last batch of pesto, he took seeds and membranes out of half the peppers (such a tedious job) and buzzed them and the last of our onion crop through the food processor (ditto). All that was left for me to do was sterilize the jars and lids, put the pepper relish together and cook it for an hour and can it. 8 pints, which is a bunch, plus just enough leftover to put on field peas this week.

Pepper relish

Sunday morning put a small, sliced venison roast (from friends Jody’s and John’s Virginia farm) in the crockpot with an envelope of onion soup mix, a can of condensed cream of mushroom soup, a sliced onion, Worcestershire and soy sauces and a generous sprinkling of Cajun seasoning. Never cooked venison before although I ate it plenty (and under protest) as a kid in Pennsylvania. It wasn’t tough or dry and had an appealingly robust taste over noodles.

Started the peaches fermenting for Christmas fruit cakes, made broccoli-raisin-peanut funeral salad and got the new fall-blooming fragrant clematis in the ground (thanks, Jane and Dan, although around here they say if you thank someone for a gift plant, it won’t grow).

Saturday afternoon we ate chili (me) and chicken stew (my lumberjack) at Taproot Artisans mini-fundraiser in Harmony. We did not try the deep-fried pumpkin pie but did get two deep-fried Oreos (they taste like little chocolate pies with a soft dough and 98 calories each). And since I never get tired of sweetpotatoes or butternut squash, I got the sweetpotato souffle for dessert. Light and buttery, it had just a hint of brandy extract maybe?

Just walked 3 miles so I could have some popcorn tonight during “DWTS.” (I agree with Bobby Flay: I exercise so I can eat!) Probably not the best attitude. But I’m so lucky that “all” I have to do is eat less, exercise more and shed poundage. I looked out of the choir loft yesterday at a friend who’s just out of rehab and thought, my gosh, it would be so much harder to have every neuron screaming for pharmaceuticals. Mine just crave sugar, and they seem to be giving up on that. Or at least asking more politely.

One and a half miles from our house

Category:

Exercise, good food, healthy cooking, Meat, Rural life, Seasonal food

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Biking with buggies, sweetpotato hash

Sunday afternoon we trucked our bikes across US 21 and into Yadkin County. I hadn’t realized that those few miles would put us so much closer to the blue Brushy Mountains nor how much Amish buggy traffic we’d see late on a Sunday.

The air was as crisp as a fall apple — I stayed chilly in shorts and a sweatshirt, even while peddling — and the clear gold that seems to magnify every leaf and ladybug as sunset nears. The buggies had black curtains up against the chill, but in the last that passed us we could see a baby roughly the size of a loaf of Italian bread, swaddled in pink and nestled under her grandmother’s chin.

We are learning to say that certain settlements — or lack thereof — “look like dogs.” Loose dogs, that is, although yesterday we would have been hard pressed to say which pack was funnier — the three Lab-mix black puppies storming from one place or the three brown chihuahuas from another. We do take perverse pleasure in riding in one direction — dogs streaming behind us — only to ride back as soon as they return home and settle down. In fact, Mr. Funny Pants suggested we go a third time past the puppies after their owner finally came outside and called them back to their perch on the side porch. (We didn’t.)

We came home to fish sandwiches, homemade cole slaw and the first of this year’s sweetpotatoes, bright-orange treats about the size of three thumbs, no bigger. These are so different from the dry, pale-yellow yams I grew up with in Pennsylvania as to be an entirely different vegetable.

Most of our youngest’s high-chair suppers were nothing more than a small sweetpotato (written without a space in the South) with a cooked egg, applesauce and milk. That covered all the food groups, and she never tired of the menu.

Our neighbor Esker T. went somewhere Down East where the soil’s sandy and brought back a pickup truck loaded with these sweet, moist gems. We were the beneficiaries of enough to carry us at least through the holidays and probably longer.

A sweetpotato supper we still enjoy on crispy fall nights is this meatless hash  from the American Profile newspaper supplement. It’s easy and hearty and something a little different (like the mashed sweets with jalapeno and maple syrup at the Blue Parrot Bistro in Gettysburg, Pa.). You’ll need a big heavy skillet, meaning: Well-seasoned cast iron works really well.

Sweetpotato hash with baked eggs

2 to 3 tablespoons olive oil

2 large sweetpotatoes, peeled and chopped into 1/4- to 1/2-inch dice (about 2-2/3 cups)

1-1/3 cups minced yellow onion

1 big garlic clove, minced

1 jalapeno pepper, seeded and minced (don’t forget the rubber gloves when handling this)

1/4 teaspoon salt, divided

Coarsely ground black pepper to taste

4 eggs

3 tablespoons minced fresh parsley

Heat oven to 400. Heat oil in skillet over medium heat. Add potato dice and 0nion and cook about 5 minutes, stirring occasionally, or until potatoes are tender. Reduce heat, add garlic and jalapeno and cook another 1 to 2 minutes. Season with 1/8 teaspoon salt and pepper.

Make 4 evenly spaced, slight depressions in hash and break an egg into each one (breaking the yolks if you so desire, which I always so desire). Place pan in heated oven and bake 8 to 10 minutes or until eggs are cooked to your preference. Remove, season eggs with remaining salt and pepper and garnish with parsley. Serves 4.

Category:

Exercise, good food, Rural life, Seasonal food

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Belle is dead, fall is here

Belle in sequined purple ear net I decorated

Belle died sometime last Monday night. She was 20 or 21 and a good girl. She put up with parades, costumes, bunches of children on her back, pasture mates with brains the size of walnuts, a rider the size of a polar bear (that would have been me until this summer). She lived with us for just two months shy of seven years, and I don’t know that I’ll ever get used to looking outside and missing her snow-white self.
 
Every lover, every child, every animal is indeed a hostage to fortune and, as far as fortunes went, hers improved dramatically here. A previous idiot custodian had used a wire coat hangar on her for a bit. I spent two years and finally got her to live with a very gentle snaffle that actually fit her huge mouth (she was a Percheron-Paint cross with a head that weighed more than any of my five grandchildren).
 
We went trail riding, mostly walk-trot and nothing Alpine. She got plenty of peppermints, carrots and apples and always had her bellybutton scratched as part of a grooming. I certainly wasn’t the best owner-rider in the world; nor was I the worst.
 
She, in turn, was a good sport about things like wearing pink fairy wings or like being carried off to pony club camp one June where she was stabled in a 12-foot stall which would have been fine IF she’d ever been in a stall before. We decided she hadn’t because every time our daughter went to fetch her that week, she was in EXACTLY the same frozen position looking like a very big and anxious white rabbit.
 
When my mother died I kept thinking for years that she had just stepped away from the phone whenever I wanted to tell her something. Now I find myself looking at paddock boots on sale or notices of timed trail rides and then thinking, “I don’t need them right now.” “I can’t do that.”
 

Belle with a terribly sunburned nose after we were gone for 4 days in June

I have to be grateful that she went fairly quickly for a colicking horse and without too much pain. I’ve heard stories of horses’ deaths that would make you faint. But, darn, I miss her. When a bit more time has passed, I’m going to walk out to the hilltop where Billy buried her, alongside Hannah’s first horse, Gem Terra, the super Arab.
 
When it was time for Gem, who was 26, to go before he had to endure another miserable North Carolina summer, Hannah and her best friend Sarah stayed home from school and hand-grazed him, groomed him and enjoyed the sunny spring morning with him. Hannah stayed while the vet put him down and walked away before the back-hoe and the front-end loader arrived.
 
I wish Belle hadn’t died without me, but she died in the middle of the night. My being there would have been more for me than for her. Billy cut a long piece of her tail so I can have a  bracelet made. I keep thinking there must be seas of grass in heaven, and that, should I go, I’ll see her with her head buried in the tenderest shoots. She’ll pick up that head and look at me with those huge dark eyes. Every horse owner has this thought. And we know that if our horses aren’t there, we don’t want to go either.
 
The purple asters begin their extravagant fall bloom. The zinnias put on one last show before frost. A listless cricket cheeps from the wisteria. Hooves thunder as those walnut-brained geldings gallop up from their back pasture. As the world turns…..
 
 

Category:

Owning horses, Rural life

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Southern salsa

Pepper relish on field peas with cornbread and 'maters.

One of my favorite discoveries after moving to North Carolina 33 years ago was pepper relish. Not pepper jelly which is usually nothing more than pectin, sugar and food coloring, but pepper relish which is tiny pieces of pickled peppers — just like in the nursery rhyme. 

Pepper relish is not easy to make (only because there’s so much chopping), but it is simple and a good first-time canning project for someone in search of same. With so much vinegar and sugar, you probably don’t need to worry about killing anyone, unlike trying something non-acidic for your initial go.

Peppers grow like mad in our hot southern summers. Pepper relish is one of those zippy condiments invented by southern cooks looking to spice up their field peas, a cheap, easy protein source that all cooks, no matter how poor, grew in their gardens. Field peas, blackeyed peas, crowder peas — they all need pepper relish like Mars needs moms.

Pepper relish is good on cream cheese and crackers, added to meatloaf, atop scrambled eggs or in a chicken, pork or beef sandwich. I wouldn’t try it on ice cream, but it improves just about everything else. This recipe is from Southern Food on about.com. I added the jalapenos because we like our zippy zipped up just a smidge.

Sweet pepper relish

20 large bell peppers of varying colors, seeds and membranes removed, about 6 pounds

3 to 6 jalapenos

1-1/2 pounds sweet onions

1/4 cup kosher or pickling salt

5 cups sugar

2 cups white vinegar

2 cups cider vinegar

1 tablespoon yellow mustard sereds

1 tablespoon sweet Hungarian parika, optional

Coarsely chop some of the peppers and some of the onions to give texture to your relish. Run the rest through a food grinder or processor. Combine all in a large, non-reactive bowl with salt; toss to mix thoroughly. Cover with ice and let stand for 3 hours. (During this time, you can wash and sterilize jars, lids, rims and utensils if you like.)

Drain peppers, squeezing to get as much moisture out as possible. (You’ll find this mixture has the best and freshest smell to ever come out of your garden or the farmer’s market.) In large nonreactive kettle, combine vinegars, sugar, mustard and paprika, if using. Add well-drained peppers and onions, stir and bring to boil. Reduce heat to medium low and simmer, uncovered, for 50 to 60 minutes, until slightly thickened and darkened. Stir occasionally. (I always use a diffuser under the kettle to prevent all that sugar from scorching.)

Meanwhile, fill a boiling water bath canner about half full. Add clean canning jars and rims

Ice on peppers and onions in big stainless bowl.

to the water and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to low and keep jars warm.

In saucepan, bring water to simmer, turn to low and add the flat lids. Keep lids in hot water until ready to use (you don’t want rubber seals  boiled more than once and that will be in the canner, not before).

When pepper mixture finishes cooking, ladle into hot drained jars. Fill to within 1/2 inch of jar top. Stir with clean utensil to get rid of air bubbles. With damp clean paper towel, wipe rims of jars. Return jars with rims and lids to boiling water bath (1 inch of water above lids) and gently boil for 10 minutes. Stand on several layers of clean towels away from any breezes or drafts. In 24 hours test seals and tighten rims. Label and store in cool, dark place for 3 months before eating. Makes 17 to 18 half-pints (probably enough for some holiday giving).

Category:

good food, healthy cooking, Rural life, Seasonal food

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