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I like to play at making seasoning mixes. Sometimes a seasoned salt, sometimes a seasoned pepper.    Last year I grew ghosts, and my seasoned pepper supply was almost out, so I pulled a jar of "ghost flake" out of the cabinet and ground it fine along with the typical SPOG.   My first tasting...

  To His Coy Pepper Plant with apologies to Andrew Marvell   Had we but garden space, and time, This under-ripeness were no crime. You could leaf out, and think which way To ripen slowly through the day. Thou, in the sun's unending light, Should'st rubies grow; I by the side, Perspiring, would...

Today I took my last picking of tomatoes, mostly romas with some small cherry. I ran those through the blender with onion and garlic and salt, but I messed up and added too much salt for this to be used as a typical tomato sauce.   So, I added some of my hot peppers and made it into a hot sauce...

I get ripe peppers from my little patch, bit by bit and type by type.   I picked some fatalis earlier, and dried them, and ground them into a seasoning similar to last year's ghost pepper seasoning Yes it has a kick.   Today I picked a round of mixed red peppers, mostly hot but not all...

Recently I had a lot of peppers to process, mostly moderate hots of several kinds, and some sweets.   The loaner food processor is down, so it;s either chopping by knife, or the 1960s Oster blender.  I went with chopping, to make some fork-snack peppers.    I stemmed and seeded the peppers, and...

I was hoping to find fatalis at my Home Depot, but no luck (I thought).   This morning I was weeding/harvesting, and I found these.     Well, I'm happy. But what about the other people who bought whatever it was that was mis-marked?   "Mommy, this pepper looks funny."   "It's still good, go...

Yesterday I made a sauce whose only peppers were red serranos. It came out much hotter than I expected.   The first few seconds, it seems like there isn't much heat but then, oh wow here it comes.  

I've been picking several varieties of peppers as they ripen, and they were beginning to crowd the kitchen table. So I roasted a bunch of them, which put a nice aroma in the house.   When they were done, I stemmed them and scraped out seeds. Then I brought out the 1960s Oster blender  I cut the...

Sometimes I likee to experiment with whatever I have on hand.  This time, I have habaneros, bananas, and vanilla yogurt.   So ... ?   I cut the hab into thin strips, then mashed them in a mortar and pestle along with a spoon or two of the yogurt.  I used a potato masher to blend the banana with...

I use a blade-type coffee grinder to grind salt with homegrown dried herbs and peppers. This leaves some dust in the grinder, and I'm afraid to wash it with water. I used to wipe that out with a paper towel, but I switched to using plain white rice, grinding it to scour out whatever had been...

Twenty years ago, chileheads were corresponding on a mailing list comprising only plain-text email messages, no GUI or images. It was a thriving list but it faded over the years as other media have emerged. Some of you may have been there; I'm pretty sure that NECM was. I am there as Alex...

Sometimes some tool intended for some other use proves to be handy around the kitchen. A well-known example is a carpenter's rasp, which proves itself for zesting, etc. Have you adapted something to kitchen use?   Here's a recent one for me. I bought this paper towel holder at a discount tool...

From time to time I buy a box of brownie mix. Easy to prepare and cook, and an inexpensive snack.   But I can't leave well enough alone. I almost always use milk instead of the water called for in the instructions. I like to spike the batter with vanilla extract (mixed into the wet part of the...

I apologize if this has been covered before, but I love how roasting dried peppers to just the right extent will turn some of the heat into a nice nutty flavor. It seems there's a narrow window of "done-ness" where this happens - go a little too far and it begins to taste scorched.   I have a...

They say you can watch the world like a movie. I say you can also reach into the picture and change things. That's why I've been involved in local environmental activism, running the Friends of the Scioto River.   I got involved at first because I kept hearing news reports of someone jogging a...

Some little munch, just a coffee mug of dry Cheerios cereal.   But it's lacking something ... I know, a spoon of confectioner's sugar, mixed 50/50 with cayenne powder!

I cook for the four of us in the house. One likes Frank's hot sauce and the other two can't tolerate any pepper. That leaves me, chopping and snorting lines of habanero dust. As Richard Pryor said, I like it for the flavor.   Seriously, when you're cooking and you're a chilehead, but your...

Hello all, it's nice to find a busy pepper discussion forum! I've been on many, going back to the old Chile Heads mailing list. If anyone here remembers that, or what "Open Fields" or "being Disneyed" means, give a shout.   I have a modest pepper garden (under snow now) and I have a lot of...