Bill and Sheila Do Canning

Sheila loves her little backyard garden. Some of her happiest hours are spent back there digging around in the dirt and watching her little crop grow. The garden did well this year.  The okra and peppers did exceptionally well.  We gave away okra to everyone in the neighborhood and everyone who came to the house. We sent Olivia, a lovely latina lady who helps Sheila with the house, home with big bags of veggies every time she came.  But, we still had a dining table full of vegetables, mostly peppers, a lot of jalapenos, a nice bunch of various sweet peppers, some habeneros and some that had apparently cross pollinated.

Yesterday, we spent the morning cleaning house. We were just getting ready to fix lunch when the doorbell rang.  It was Olivia with a huge bowl of Pozole that she had cooked the night before. Pozole is a Mexican stew made of pork, hominy and chilis.  You eat it garnished with crisp tortillas, shredded lettuce or cabbage, onions and radishes and lime or lemon juice.  It was an amazing lunch.

After lunch, Sheila decided to can some jalapeno jelly. Jalapeno jelly sounds like an oxymoron to Yankees and midwesterners who don't tolerate spicy food well anyway.  To the unwary, it looks like a clear, mild apple or mint jelly. However, the moment it hits your tongue you will be disabused of that notion.  To those who develop a taste for it, it is a culinary delight. It is good eaten plain on toast with butter or a garnish on meat. But, when you add cream cheese to the mixture and serve it on toast points you have a gourmet delicacy, sweet, savory, hot and creamy all at the same time.  We nearly doubled the amount of jalapenos called for in the recipe and got the temperature just right for folks who eat authentic Mexican in the local barrio almost daily.

Unfortunately, the batch of jelly didn't make a scratch in the number of peppers we still had on hand so Sheila decided to pickle some.  We already had the hot water bath going and all of the equipment out so why not?  By the time the first batch was cooling, it was dinner time and we were out of fruit jars. So, we went down the street to Sam's Southern Eatery and had dinner and then on to the WalMart Neighborhood Market for more fruit jars. 

By the time we finished, we had nearly a case of 1/4 pint jars of jalapeno jelly and nearly two cases of half pint jars of pickled jalapenos.   It was also past eight o'clock and kitchen was a disaster area.  But, nothing would do Sheila but to have it completely clean before she went to bed.  I was asleep long before she was finished.

As we were sealing the last few jars, I decided to taste the product.  Sheila warned me not to.  She had been wearing two pairs of surgical gloves all through the process and still had pepper burns on her hands.  I told myself it couldn't be that bad, picked a couple of slices off of the top of the jar closest to me and popped them in my mouth.  Within seconds, I was chugging lemonade straight from the half gallon jar in the fridge.  It would appear that our little jalapeno friends must have cross pollinated with their habanero neighbors or something.  The pickling process will calm them down some I'm sure, but these are not going to be peppers for sissies and Yankees. 

I'm sure my mom was looking down from heaven and laughing her head off at Sheila and I canning itty bitty jars of condiments in a pasta cooker.  When I was a child, I spent many long, steamy days in the kitchen with mom working over her high tech steam pressure canner putting up quart jars of everything from corn and peas to sausage patties and beef stew for the winter. 

Sometimes you do things for the joy and symbolism of it.  I'm sure we could have bought a couple of cases of pickled jalapenos and a case of jalapeno jelly for a lot less than it cost to make it, especially if you factor in the hourly rate for Sheila and I's labor.  But, it wouldn't have been peppers from our garden and canned in our kitchen.  To people who grew up on farms, there is something primal and satisfying about putting your crop away for the winter, even if it just symbolic.  And yes, even though we wore ourselves out, a good time was had by all.