Home's Jewels: October 2006

Birthday Girl

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Pearly just celebrated her 12th birthday. Here she is with new presents which happened to be pink.

And here is little brother teasing her about her PINK presents. Brothers! Life would be pretty boring without teasing brothers.

Busy Day

>> Saturday, October 28, 2006 – Baby of the family, On the homefront

We had a gorgeous day today. Spent some time out in the front yard gardening and a few hours making more applesauce and pear sauce. Pearly had a volleyball tournament all day, so I quickly grabbed some yarn and pattern for brainless project - you know a project that you can start and stop easily when interrupted. Unfortunately, only this amount was accomplished because I was asked to be scorekeeper. Oh well!

Pearly's team placed 2nd in the tournament, but more importantly, the kids did such a great job and showed great sportsmanship. The first tournament, they lost every game, so this was quite an improvement.

Every once in a while, PJ indulges me with some cuddling. A cuddly baby is a rare thing in our household. Only one other baby (out of 7) has been a cuddler, so everything stops when he's in the mood to cuddle. This is pure bliss I tell you!

Pepper Jelly Update

Despite adding 5 cayenne peppers to increase the heat index from my first batch of pepper jelly, this batch still does not have the kick I want. Here's the recipe I used. Pepper Jelly

Next time, I will add some habenero peppers. Here's an interesting heat index chart for peppers. Habeneros are definitely the hottest pepper. Scoville Pepper Scale

I have been pondering why the jelly didn't have a "kick" when I increased the hot peppers. But thinking back, when I was about 9 month pregnant with our first baby, we went to a Chinese restaurant. There was something on my plate that looked like a shriveled up mushroom. I anxiously put it in my mouth ready to savor it when all of a sudden I thought my head would explode. My mom looked at me and saw my eyes watering and my face completely red. She later told me she thought I'd go into labor. That mushroom was a hot pepper of some kind. I tried water, rice, soy sauce, anything, but nothing was taking away the heat. Finally, the waitress suggested a teaspoon of white sugar. The sugar instantly cut the heat.

Now it makes sense why my pepper jelly isn't producing the strong heat effect I have wanted - the sugar is diminising its impact. Interestingly, when I use even 1/4 of the peppers for my salsa recipe, it's quite hot (there's hardly any sugar in the recipe) - in fact, much hotter than the pepper jelly.

Learn something new everyday.

Pepper Jelly

>> Monday, October 16, 2006 – What's cookin'?

My girlfriend made some pepper jelly last week and boy was I hooked. We put it on a whole wheat cracker with cream cheese. Here's the first batch I made on Saturday. I'm making more today as well as hopefully finishing up the last of the applesauce and pear sauce.

Grapes

>> Sunday, October 15, 2006 – Bloom - where are you planted?, What's cookin'?

We're still busy harvesting the last of our garden produce and fruit. Last week we processed grapes. We got a few gallons of grape juice (pictured). We have 3 colors of grapes - white, pink, and Concord. I don't know if the white and pink are varieties of Concord or not (must make mental note to look that up). For the first time this year, we made grape jelly - actually 19-yr old made it. It was out of this world. Next year, we will focus our efforts on making jelly! It's very easy to make using our juicer.

Grape Juice

Grape Jelly

Sampling of white grapes

Here's the crazy thing - our grape vines decided to grow waaay high vertical - over 2 stories high in the trees next to our property line.

You can see my daughter standing on the roof of our trailer getting what she could. The grapes actually traveled a good 15 feet taller than that.

There were quite a few grapes that we couldn't reach. You can see the bowl/bucket of grapes on the ground (only a small fraction of harvested grapes) and our neighbors trees. The grapes grew nearly to the top of the tree in the middle of the picture.