Christmas prep
Strictly speaking, "Christmas prep" is "Advent," but I'm talking about housekeeping matters. I was just about to post an account of our latest foray into pepper sauces when I saw Grim's post about mango hot sauce, which happens to be one of the two we made this year, along with a sweet-and-sour chile sauce. Actually, both are sweet and sour, but the second sauce is tomato-based. Greg made it into a killer sweet-and-sour pork last night, quite fiery. The pork was flour-dusted rather than batter-fried, and I was skeptical, but it was great. If we ever try to serve it to guests, we may tone down the heat a bit. This ended up about as hot as Vindaloo, which suits us both.
We mailed off batches of both kinds of hot sauce to various relatives. (All parcel mailing complete by Dec. 12, a record!) The sauces we've been making since the pepper harvest began to arrive are from this fermented hot sauce cookbook. These are easy recipes, using either with a specialized crock or just a Mason jar that you burp daily for the week or two of the ferment. Usually you cook or blend up the ferment with fresh ingredients when its time is up. You can use fresh or dried peppers.
In other holiday prep news, I set up a dog-proof miniature tree grove on top of the piano for all the little disks I painted last year. They didn't seem to blend well with the crystals and snowflakes on the bigger trees. One display is transparent, lacy, and pastel while the other is large, opaque, regular, primary-colored, and blunt-edged.
I continue to produce about one snowflake a day.
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3 comments:
Very nice as always, Tex. I might look into fermenting sauces. I ferment mead, so it’s not out of my way.
Both lovely, but I find the snowflakes absolutely mesmerizing. Sublime.
The pepper ferments are like falling off a log: add salt and water and a few other things, put a lid on it, forget it for 10-14 days, then add some stuff in a blender. It's easier than cucumber pickles, which at least present a challenge in crispness. Peppers also are one of the easiest things for us to grow here, the only challenge being to avoid those annoying seed varieties which produce no noticeable heat. We sent off for some very pretty purple cayennes that turned out to be about as hot as a bell pepper, for crying out loud. Thai peppers have done well.
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