Pickling Peppers and Other Weekend News...

I have never before made pickled peppers and I have yet to try the ones that I pickled over the weekend. They sure do look good but they have to soak in their brine for a couple weeks before we'll be able to give them a try.

I was given the recipe and found it to be so easy, I couldn't resist trying it out. I was also given the peppers which made it sound even better. A friend of mine down at Pee Wee's gave me enough jalapeno peppers to fill four pint jars and she gave me enough sweet banana peppers to fill two quart jars and one pint jar. So I'm set for peppers for quite some time. If they turn out to be any good.

So the recipe goes like this (Kat, I'm pretty sure you'll skip this part but Mike might be interested if he grew jalapeno peppers this year haha): take your jalapeno peppers and cut the stem ends off of them. In a quart jar mix 60% vinegar with 40% water and then add about a tablespoon of canning salt. You can use regular salt but your brine might turn cloudy on you. It won't hurt anything, it just doesn't look as pretty.

Wash your pint jars and rings in very hot, very soapy water and let them air dry. When the jars are dry, pack the jalapeno peppers into them as tightly as you possibly can. Pour the brine mixture over them and put the lids on the jars. That's it!!! Really!!!

I want to say I probably had about 2-3 lbs of jalapeno peppers and they filled the four pint jars with no room to spare. In fact, I had one lone pepper left and couldn't squeeze it into any of the four jars. So that kind of gives you an idea of how many peppers and jars you'll need.

The sweet banana peppers I did the same way except I didn't cut the ends off. In hind sight I realize I should have because the stem ends turned a brownish color that isn't as pretty as the one pint jar where I did cut off the stem ends. You can see the pictures on the attached flickr site. Tell me which ones are your favorite????

The flickr site was updated today. I've had some troubles with it lately but I'm hoping today it will be back to normal. There are pictures of the chow-chow and pear preserves from last week and pickled peppers and outdoor pictures from this weekend.

Saturday and Sunday our temperatures were in the upper 80s. That may not sound like much but believe me it was a welcome relief. Saturday I hung clothes on the line and didn't even sweat! I staked my tomato plant again. This is one that insists on falling over no matter what I do. In all there are about 10 tomatoes still ripening on the vines and with new flowers just beginning to bloom, I may even get a few more before the season is completely over. The farmers may be done with their tomatoes but mine went in a little later than most so I'm still enjoying picking one or two here or there as days go by.

We let Colt and Ruger run free for a couple hours both days and stayed outside as much as we could while it was still nice enough to do so. They are doing better about sitting with us without pawing us or slobbering all over us! But they are still puppies and they do love to run and play so we sit out there on the benches and watch them as they go.

Saturday morning I took out a pork shoulder that I bought on sale at Food Lion. I poured on a little bit of Dale's seasoning the rubbed it down with some bbq rub. I poked holes all in it then stuffed them with slices of fresh garlic. Wally got the fire going for the smoker and put the meat into a cast iron skillet. He filled the skillet with beer to tenderize it and by mid-afternoon it was slowly smoking to tasty perfection.

Well now man can not live on pork alone (hahahaha) so we had ranch potato salad and fried eggplant to go with it. When the meat came out of that smoker, the top (layer of fat) was brown and crispy while the inside had a pink smoke ring and was so tender it fell apart when I tried to slice it.

As much as I wanted to eat that fat, I had to let it go. If Dizzy Debbie were here, she would have eaten it all. It was probably only a few bites but boy did they ever look yummy. I figured the fried eggplant would be enough fat for one day :) :)

Not to keep going on about food but it seems it was a food weekend. I got another recipe from the friend who showed me how to make fried chicken. This one she calls steak and gravy. Now this is a little bit trickier mainly because gravy is a little bit tricky. I took the round steak (she suggested), cut it into steak looking pieces, seasoned it and browned it in some oil in the cast iron skillet. It doesn't get cooked in the skillet but you do want to brown it just a little.

Once it browns, lay it in a casserole dish big enough to hold all your steak pieces and the gravy. You may or may not need to add more oil for the gravy but what I had looked to be just right. I let the oil get hot then sprinkled in about 2 tbsps of flour. When that got blended in, it was still too loose so I added another couple tbsps of flour. Now it was looking good. It gets to the point where it's almost a crumble of flour.

Once the flour gets together like that, you start adding water. Stir the water in until it's combined with the flour and keep adding more water until your gravy is the consistency that YOU like. I like mine not too thick, not too thin. I also added my salt and pepper at this point. When the gravy is how you like it seasoned, pour it over the steaks in the casserole dish.

The dish goes into a 350 degree oven for about and hour, maybe and hour and 15 minutes depending on the thickness of the steak. Using round steak calls for a long cooking time because it tends to be kind of tough. The gravy and the cooking time help to tenderize the steak and imparts a great deal of flavor. We could smell them way before they ever got done. The casserole came out of the oven hot and bubbly and I wished I had made some sourdough bread well in advance for sopping up all that gravy!

I cooked my purple hull peas and the acorn squash from the CSA basket to go with our steak and gravy. Talk about a Sunday afternoon dinner that will make you put your feet up and just sit a while...woohooo this one sure did it. We didn't feel like moving when that feast was over LOL

Of course we did get up and move around though. I cleaned up the kitchen while Wally took care of some stuff that needed done outside. This would be so easy to make for a crowd and a little goes a long way. It was very flavorful and tender and I just don't see how anyone could not like it. It might be better suited to a cool weather dinner but other than that, it's on my list to make again!

That list continues to grow!

I supposed if you weren't able to make the gravy home-made, you could use the packet gravy or the wondra gravy mix. Either one would work just fine so long as there is enough of it to cover the steak and allow it to cook without drying up.

I hope you enjoy these recipes yourself sometime soon. Otherwise, I'll just have to come down there and cook them for you myself!! LOL Just kidding. That's going to be a while yet :) :)

This weekend I'm hoping to make it to the Fair On The Square in Centerville. They'll have music, food, arts & crafts and all kinds of good stuff going on. It should be a fun time and with any luck we'll have nice weather like we did this past weekend.

We rode the 4 wheelers out on the back roads and didn't see another single vehicle even though we were out for about 2 hours. We crossed the creek at the concrete bridge (that's underwater) and rode tree lined dirt roads watching for deer and other wild animals all along the way. It was dark outside so the going is a bit slower in order to avoid the holes in the roads. It was nice and cool and next time, I do believe I'll have to carry a jacket. Can you believe it's finally that nice at night where a jacket is required???? Wow the summer heat seems to have gone on forever this year.

There are just a few varieties of trees whose leaves have started turning yellow and red. The full onset of fall isn't here yet but you can somehow sense that it's coming. I was tempted to get the winter clothes out of storage and wash them in preparation of the cool temperatures to come. Ha! Not quite yet deary... we're supposed to be back up to 95 degrees by Wednesday...hahahahaha the joke is on me :)

I won't get a CSA basket for a couple of weeks. As the summer crops are in decline, they haven't enough to fill all the baskets. They take this extra bit of crops to the farmer's market on Saturday and sell them to make extra money. Those of us in the CSA are welcome to buy some of these extra crops and we get them at a discount but my refrigerator is still full from all that I haven't had a chance to eat yet.

The butternut squash is still fresh and so is the patty pan (the last two of the year). I have another bag of  green beans and a bag of okra (that's going to get chopped up and frozen for gumbo when it gets cold outside) and one last bag of purple viking potatoes. I have 4 green peppers and two red peppers still to eat and basil that has rooted in the glass of water much like the 4 o'clocks did. LOL Guess I'll plant it and grown my own!

I hope you're enjoying the late summer/early fall harvest wherever you happen to be. I can't wait for the sweet potatoes, beets, turnips and carrots to start filling my baskets again! This one week seems like it's taking forever and I still have another one to go!

September quickly approaches - can you believe how fast August went by? With September comes football season and I'm ready for some MONDAY NIGHT FOOTBALL. I still like watching the races but football seems to go hand in hand with all the fall festivites around here. Pretty soon we'll be in long sleeves...hahahaha!

 "A dog can express more with his tail in seconds than his owner can express with his tongue in hours."~Author Unknown