The girls love jalapeños and spicy foods in general. It’s not uncommon for me to make something relatively mild and one of them to ask if they can have peppers with it, too. Who am I to say no?

Last summer I had access to garden fresh ones from a friend of the family, so I was using them frequently. One day, though, I burned myself really bad.

Until that point, I didn’t even own rubber gloves, much less actually use them, and I’d never had any issues. I would always just be careful not to get the oil in my eyes and wash well when I was done. Not this day, though. This particular day lit my hands on fire and they ached for over a week. I searched for solutions online but by that time, the damage was done and all I could really do was wait it out.

The worst part wasn’t the surface burns, though, but rather that the jalapeño fun had gotten under my nails, too, and even a simple act like scratching an itch would reignite burning sensations. If you’ve never been burned by peppers before (and I hadn’t…at least not more than just slightly anyway), it basically feels like you’ve touched a hot burner….and then laid out in the sun, fallen asleep, and sunburned yourself to a crisp. Except there’s no soothing it with aloe. :(

Anyway…

After my fresh stock ran out, my plan was to find a large jar of sliced jalapenos to have on hand. No more of this “cutting one a night” and risking burning myself again. Sure, I bought a pair of gloves to have on hand, but that’s not the point. I wanted to be able to reach into the fridge, pull out the little slices of heat, and move on.

Instead, I stumbled across the 6 *pound* can of jalapeño peppers and became giddy. Do you have any idea what I could do with that many peppers!?!?  Yeah, me neither, but I was suddenly envisioning several bowls of different sliced, diced, and whole peppers, neatly stacked in the back of my fridge.

And so I made it true:

I immediately turned over half of the whole ones into pepper poppers. The rest got stacked neatly in the back of my fridge and have been used extensively since. I don’t remember how long it took me to do all the de-seeding and cutting, but it wasn’t ‘that’ long. Considering they’re pickled and we don’t eat ‘that’ many at once, these will last for many months to come, with no future effort required.

Tip: Do this while the kids aren’t home. I ended up terrifying mine by not letting them anywhere near where spicy oils might fly. I burned myself really bad, remember? Lol. The next few times I put jalapenos on the table, they were a bit reluctant to pick them up with their fingers and I felt bad. :( Oops!

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