Peppers, Peppers Everywhere

20 pepper plants is a LOT, which has amazingly resulted in a LOT of peppers. A sweet pepper harvestwhich was mostly dehydrated
and gave me almost as many peppers as I dried all last summer:I think I'm going to need another jar or two. We kept the orange ones out because I had never grown them before, so tonight I stuffed them with a little yogurt, chopped onion, cooked red wheat berries, a little seasoning, and some feta cheese
and put them on the grill. (And in case you're wondering, the little tin foil cups are to keep them upright).

The Anaheim peppers have been going crazy next to the peas
this being only the LARGE peppers from 2 plants. I'm hoping these work out well as a dried pepper because thisis a really good way to make your eyes water all day long. Not sure if I'm even going to attempt to dry any jalapenos.......maybe only if we're going to leave the house?

Today I Wanted a Cookie

Which is sort of bizarre as I am not in general a sweets fan and cookies are pretty much at the bottom of the sweets list anyway, but today I really wanted a cookie.

Which in my world means making cookies.

Today had cooled off some, but I still wasn't going to turn on the oven, so that left "no-bake" cookies--except that shredded coconut has all sorts of additives and is off limits. So in my alternate universe, wheat bran is a good substitute for coconut....which might have something to do with why I'm not allowed to bring desserts anywhere. I am guessing that wheat bran might not contribute to the flavor of the cookie like sweetened coconut does, so I substituted half the butter for peanut butter, threw in some dry roasted peanuts and a bit of extra salt, and voila!No-bake peanut butter, chocolate, and wheat bran cookies. I don't know if it's just the fact that we don't get chocolate very often or that it's been so long neither of us would remember what the "real thing" tastes like anyway, but I thought they were pretty good.

Of course, I'm the one who thought up this whole crazy experiment anyway, so......

Things I've Learned This Month

* It's best to can pickles in the morning rather than at night. It seems to be easiest to dive in when I'm not quite fully awake.

* The most prolific tomatoes are going to be the least-helpful ones....in this case, the volunteer grape tomatoes. No matter how much I want salsa, they are such a pain to peel....

* Next year no matter WHAT the tag says about "easy to grow," if it says "heirloom" I'm putting the plant down and pretending it never existed.

* If you actually have worn the rubber off of your jar lifters, you might be a bit of a canning overachiever.

* Gardening newsletters might be right about planting the seedlings for the fall garden in July and August, but they fail to explain what to do with them when they're several inches tall and it's still 90+ degrees outside.

* Julia Child makes an excellent pizza crust--even when you don't follow her directions exactly as written. This still does not encourage me to cook with an entire stick of butter.

* I might just be a bit perverse, but when people start spreading rumors about "death panels" to try to defeat a healthcare plan, the plan seems like something I probably want to support.

* It's going to take more than 2 days before I'm willing to discuss the whole "carrot-bourbon jam" episode....

* As much as it pains me to say this, I think I'm glad we ended up with the pattypan squash. It doesn't get as bitter or as watery as zucchini. And they're kind of cute.

* If you're just after zucchini bread and cake, freezing shredded zucchini works just fine.

* No matter how hard you try, you just can't explain sleeping in on weekends to a cat.

A Trip To the Dark Side

Our youngest kitty, Theo, now needs a special dust-free cat litter, and the vet said to try Wal-Mart, so I ventured there on Thursday night.

I do not generally shop at Wal-mart, and I don't think I've been there since we started our no-processed-foods experiment, so it was a bit of a shock--perhaps a bit like dropping a vegetarian into a meat-packing plant. I think I went up and down all the aisles a few times just soaking it all in.

One aisle in particular surprised me. I don't watch television or read any of the more "sensationalistic" news sources, so I fall behind a lot, but when did people start building bomb shelters again? There's an entire aisle of this stuff. Are communes on the rise again? I didn't even WANT to know what was in the 2-pound can of "butter powder," but odds are pretty high it didn't have anything to do with butter.

And look!
Bean dip is now an "impulse buy!" Yummy!

Note To Self:

When making jam, if a recipe says "cook until thick" do not make any plans for the next 4 to 16 hours.

It Worked!

Having mostly followed Julia Child's directions for her pizza crust, I blithely ignored everything she had to say about cooking it. Not even for pizza am I turning the oven on when it's 90-some-odd degrees out.

I also felt free to disregard the "tossing" of the crust part--which she says takes very little practice. Reading between the lines, I'm still thinking that means one or two pizza crusts were pried off the ceiling or scooped up off the floor, and when we're hungry and dinner is already 3 hours late is not the time for acrobatics in the kitchen. Besides, Andy was watching & would have known if I scooped the crust up off the floor and served it anyway.

So, I rolled it out and grilled it slightly before adding toppings
Two things here worth mentioning:
1. I have never yet managed to roll anything into a circle, but I'm getting better at squares and thought I should go with my strengths
2. I realize pre-"baking" isn't a Julia step either, but I haven't actually grilled a pizza before (only grilled crusts I had pre-baked in the oven), so if the dough was going to ooze through the grill and end up flambeing on the burners, I didn't want it to take the toppings with it.

A little homemade sauce, "legal" chicken sausage, and a bit of cheese later and voila!
A really quite good pizza. (And for anyone wishing to grill their own pizza, the Rotisserie burner DOES help heat the grille a bit quicker, but will probably also burn one edge of your pizza. Just an FYI)

And yesterday's endeavor:
Six pints of salsa! And if you can believe it, since last fall I had actually forgotten how long it takes to make & can salsa. Guess the mystery of how women can go through childbirth more than once has been solved......

Dinner will be at 10:30....

So the day started with 3 batches of pickles brining in the fridge, so I got up this morning, got all my canning paraphernalia set up, and set to work. I got all 6 quart jars packed, filled, and into the canner, but when I opened the canner to see if they were boiling yet I found it full of dill seed. I realize not everyone cans, so I'll just say now--that's a REALLY bad sign. One of my jars lost its bottom, but I had packed it so tightly that all the cucumbers stayed in place. I don't know if that's a good thing or not, but it did make it a bit easier to clean up. So, we have 5 new quarts of pickles today.

Then....did I mention I planted NINE jalapeño plants? Really, I thought I would have tomatilloes by now to be using up some of the jalapenos, so it seemed like a good idea at the time (as does so much of what I do). Well, now I have scads of peppers and nothing to add them to, so I pickled one pound of them--which incidentally, is a lot of peppers. and we now have 4 more jars of pickled jalapenos. What we're going to do with them is another matter.

So, to summarize my morning:After swimming a few laps at the gym, I was feeling refreshed an invigorated enough to tackleHave I mentioned that I've been obsessed with Julia Child since I saw the movie "Julie & Julia?" Not enough to make the bizarre aspic things or to make a sauce with 3/4 of a pound of butter, but enough to decide at 5:30 to try her cornmeal pizza crust for dinner.

The good side is, she has you make it in the food processor.The bad news is....it needs to spend about two hours rising. Luckily, we had LEGAL chocolate martinis on hand:This is Andy's homemade chocolate liqueur (after about half evaporated in the "straining" process) mixed with vodka, and it's quite fabulous. So....whether the pizza is good or not is about to be completely irrelevant.

Stay tuned for tomorrow's exciting episode: PIZZA FOR BREAKFAST! And.....

SALSA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!