Six pounds of jalepeno peppers later…..
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!
Quirky Cookery labels – What do they mean?
Before I get too knee-deep in this blog, I thought I should outline what my labels mean. Do you really care? Nah, probably not, but I actually put quite a bit of thought into them, so you’re going to skim this and pretend you care. :P
When I started Quirky Jessi, I really had no plan. Over the years, I kept the labels/tags relatively vague so that I have a fair bit of them, but they’re so general that sometimes a post falls into several at once…or none at all. And to top it off, they don’t really ‘mean’ much of anything.
So for Quirky Cookery, I knew I wanted to have some pretty tight labels to help keep things organized. So many cooking sites have 50 million tags so that every post is tagged with 20 tags each. One recipe may fit into the categories of “dinner,” “vegetarian,” “ethnic,” “Mexican,” “easy,” “cheap,” “dairy-free,” “diabetes-friendly,” “organic,” “healthy,” etc, etc.
I don’t want to be every other cooking site, though. And I certainly don’t want to juggle all those tags when most people just honestly don’t care. If you’re looking for Mexican recipes, google “Mexican recipe.” If you want food that simply ‘looks’ like a Mexican flag, then now we’re talking.
Cravings and curiosities – Whether it’s food or kitchen products, these are things I’m curious about. A recipe I think would be fun to try out, but I haven’t actually tried it yet? A kitchen accessory I’m drooling over? A new food that I’m curious how it’d be? All goes here.
Culinary detours – Stories mostly, I figure. When the kids say something so hilarious that I can’t resist posting it here, or when I make a goofy mistake like burning my belly button repeatedly, I want a place to put them.
Gadgets and gizmos – Self-explanatory really. I run across a lot of quirky gadgets and the best (read: strangest) ones will end up here.
Images – Yeah, so it’s vague, general, and it doesn’t have an interesting name at all. What’s it to you? I ran out of ideas, ok? And I know I’ll be posting random pictures that won’t fit anywhere in the rest of these categories. Leave me alone! Or suggest a quirkier name.
OAMC – Stands for “Once a month cooking.” While I don’t do it just once a month, I ‘do’ tend to cook a whole bunch at once to put meals in the freezer. This frees up a lot of time for me and allows me to play with my food a bit more on some other days. I have a lot of fun shopping just once a month (minus the occasional trip for fresh produce, bread, and milk), and even more fun taking pictures of how much I cook at once.
Other sites – I love to link to other people. Everyone seems to have so many amazing ideas and they deserve as much linky love as possible.
Quirky creations – These are my own creations. Here will be silly, quirky, and/or messed up dishes that I’ve made myself.
Recipes – Duh. Recipes here. These will likely be mostly ones I’ve tried (or am going to try shortly), but that aren’t necessarily “quirky.”
Reviews – Do I need to explain this one?
Tips – Or this one? These are boring. Shhh. Tips will be listed in italics, usually at the end of posts.
So there you have it. Now you know what they all mean. Or what they’re supposed to mean. We’ll consider this my cheat sheet for the next time I forget how to label one of my own posts, ok? ;)
Disclosure: All labels are mine and I’ll change them whenever I feel like, so this list could easily multiply like flour seems to all over my table, counter, feet, and hair. In 5 years if I’m still writing here and forget that once upon a time, I wrote this post, I cannot be held liable for these being completely outdated and false. It’s not my fault. And you shouldn’t care, so shush it and go click a link instead.
Pork Marinades – Mass Experimentation
One of the things I’ve been doing for months now is buying food for an entire month and then cooking several things in bulk. I don’t quite do the full-blown once a month cooking (OAMC) production, but it still works out well regardless.
This month we bought two sets of meat from the local meat market instead of just one month’s worth, and I ended up with 80+ pounds of various meats including beef/pork roasts, steaks, pork chops, sausage, bacon, chicken, and a few other random cuts of meat.
To help me out later in the upcoming months, I went ahead and split the pork packages up into zip-loc bags in appropriate portion sizes for our family. For five of portions, I also whipped up some marinades to pour in and freeze with them so they’re all ready to go*. I’ve never used marinades much, but figured with so much pork, they were worth a shot and would give us something different to try.
I looked around for marinade suggestions online, but I wanted to use what I had on hand, so I tweaked several of these recipes to make them my own. Some won’t look much like what they original did, but they all tasted pretty good before I even put them in the bags, so I’m betting on mostly successes.
Apple Cinnamon (compiled from a few different recipes)
2-3 apples, peeled and chopped
1 cup applesauce (I’d just made some fresh applesauce, so this was perfect)
1-2 tsp. cinnamon
1 tbsp brown sugar
salt and pepper to taste
6 tbsp. oil
2 tbsp. soy sauce
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. parsley (I used about 1/2 tablespoon fresh parsley)
2 tbsp. wine vinegar (I used regular white vinegar and used a bit less, just for the tang)
1 tbsp. Worcestershire sauce
1 1/2 tsp. dry mustard (I used regular yellow mustard here)
1/2 tsp. pepper
1/4 tsp. garlic powder
1 tbsp. lemon juice (I squeezed a fresh lemon and used a bit less)
1 cup blackberry wine (Me? Keep blackberry wine on hand for cooking? I think not. I actually added some frozen berries instead, knowing full well that it’ll taste nothing like this recipe was intended, but it’s fun and different, so we’ll see how it goes….oh, and some water to make up for the liquid difference)
1/4 cup soy sauce
1/4 cup green onions
1/2 tsp ground ginger (used less ginger, simply because I didn’t want the flavor to be overpowering with the fruit attempt)
2 tbsp brown sugar
1/2 tsp garlic powder
1/4 cup olive oil
Cinnamon Honey BBQ Sauce
2 tbsp. soy sauce
1 tbsp. bbq sauce
1 tbsp. brown sugar
1 tbsp. oil
1 1/2 tsp. honey
1/2 tsp. garlic powder
1/2 tsp. cinnamon
Honey Mustard Marinade
1/3 cup vegetable oil
1/2 cup soy sauce
4 tsp. honey
3 Tbsp. Dijon Mustard
2 Tbsp. chopped fresh tarragon leaves (skipped the taragon altogether)
4 medium garlic cloves, minced or pressed through garlic press (only used 2 cloves)
1 1/2 tsp. ground black pepper
(This one was already so much of a success that it was requested we have it again soon, so I made more and tossed it in with some other pork that I left un-marinaded)
* Tip: After putting the meat with marinades, put it in the refrigerator for a few hours or overnight before freezing. You could also freeze immediately and when you’re ready to use the meat, let it thaw overnight in the fridge. This gives the meat time to really marinade in the sauces for a better flavor.
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