Tag Archives: jelly

I’m home today because my wife had to take care of some stuff with her mother, so I had to get the kids off to school and pick them up this afternoon.  It all works out since I had some stuff to get done at home.  I took the car in for maintenance and on the way back stopped off at Home Depot.  I picked up what I needed and came across a pair of Fiskars Cuts+More scissors.  Bought those and will put them through their paces.

I decided that one thing that I’m going to do in this blog is do some reviews of the tools that I use here on the homestead.  I’ve heard that you can write them off as a business expense.  I guess I’ll have to look into that.  But for now, I’m going to start doing a review each week.  I haven’t decided which day, but it will likely be either Friday or Monday.  Either way, I’ll probably pick up a new tool each Friday and do some testing to be reported the next week.  We’ll see where that goes.

Now on to the homestead.  I like to grow Jalapeno peppers.  I don’t really eat all that many of them, but they are so prolific that they really boost the ego.  Last year I planted 5 plants and had too many peppers.  So this year I only planted 1 mammoth Jalapeno plant.  I think I’ll go back to standard Jalapenos next year.  The mammoth peppers are still pretty good.  But they are too big.  I’m getting peppers off this plant that are 4″ or bigger.  My favorite way to eat Jalapenos are as poppers.  A 4″  pepper is too big to make into a popper.

Since I can’t really do poppers with them, I decided to make up some Jalapeno jelly.  I have never had it, but I’ve heard it is good.  I used the pepper jelly recipe from over at Pick Your Own.  The recipe says it makes about 5 cups of jelly, but it calls for 3/4 to 1 pound of peppers.  I went with the 1 pound of peppers so I got 6 half pint jars.  The recipe says to puree the peppers, I used a blender and put it on liquify.  The only problem with that is I ended up with a lot of foam.  It took me a while to get that to go down.

It hasn’t gelled yet, but it has only been about 2 hours.  I’m pretty confident that it will gel up.  I tasted the little bit left in the pan and it tastes really good.  I’ll likely eat it on Ritz crackers with cream cheese.  Here’s a shot of the jars.

Jalapeno jelly

As you can see, the color isn’t all that great.  It is much darker than I thought it would be.  Next time around, I might try putting some food color in it to see if that improves the appearance.  I’d like to end up with something about the color of ripe Jalapeno peppers.  But I don’t know if there’s anything that will lighten up the jelly to that shade.