Chile Pequin Recipe: Eat the Landscape

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chile-pequin-recipt
Ingredients for a chile piquin hot sauce–Tabasco style.

 

I’ve dried these in the oven before for ground red pepper. You can also wait for them to dry on the plant. Then you cut the stems and shake the peppers off. 

You can pick the green or red peppers and use them in salsa–however you’d use a hot pepper.

There’s a lot of educational stuff below the recipe. Read it if you are interested in using more of your landscape for food. You probably should read it because, you know, zombie apocalypse. You’ll need this information when that happens.

Ingredients

  1. 1/2 cup chile pequin peppers (AKA Chile petin, Bird pepper, Turkey pepper)
  2. 1/2 cup onion
  3. 1.5 tbsp. minced garlic
  4. 1 cup vinegar
  5. Salt to taste

 

RECIPE (Go see Emeril Lagasse for a better explanation.)

  1. Get a kid to harvest the red berries of the Grand Chile Pequin. This will cost you a few additional dollars for allowance. But the tedium you avoid is worth a 5 note. I don’t use the green berries because they aren’t as fragrant.
  2. Emeril’s recipe: He says 20 serranos or tabascos. Depending on your love of spiciness, get 1/4 cup to 1/2 cup of the pequin peppers.
  3. A clove or two of minced garlic. I also mush mine with the knife and some salt. Mom taught me to do that.
  4. A half of a medium onion. He says to slice thinly. It hardly matters because:
  5. Sautee for 3 minutes. Put 2 cups of water in and cook down for about 20 minutes until the liquid is gone.
  6. Blender. With a cup of vinegar. He said to use white vinegar, so I did. I doubt something untoward will happen should you use white wine vinegar. BUT WHO KNOWS. I live dangerously.
  7. Sieve it. Then do it again. And again. And again. Until you’ve got more of a liquid than a thick Pepper Smoothie.
  8. Put in a sterile (boiled 10 minutes) jar. Lid. Put in fridge for at least 2 weeks. Because Emeril says so.

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ALL THE GOOD INFORMATION

Chile pequin is an excellent landscaping bush for scorching, dry locations. And you can eat the berries. Well, peppers. Those suckers are hot! I prefer to plant bushes that serve a dual purpose. Either feed me or some animal around here–or be gone. You can’t just sit here looking pretty!

Being a native plant, the piquin has done swimmingly through both the droughts and the rains. It’s found throughout the Americas. If you are in a northern region, it would probably be an annual. But I don’t know that for sure! It dies down to the ground here in cold winters. (Yes, it does get cold in Austin. Not Minnesota cold, but enough to kill most tropical/sub-tropical plants.)

There aren’t a whole heck of a lot of recipes for some of the native landscaping plants you can find in Austin. (winecups…they tell me at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center that you can eat the tubers. Huh.)

But these are chili peppers. Seriously. This is easy. Mash ’em. Fry ’em. Put ’em in a stew. <<<—waaaiiit. That’s taters. That’s the speech Samwise Gamgee gives to Golum. Wrong plant. WAIT AGAIN. Those capsicum annuums are members of the potato family.

 

 

 

 

American Beauty Berry, Turk’s Cap, and Pomegranate Jelly

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Turk's cap flower and the small American beauty berries.
Turk’s cap flower and the small American beauty berries.
I went ahead and dried petals for my jelly. Time-consuming for you and totally unnecessary!
I went ahead and dried petals for my jelly. Time-consuming for you and totally unnecessary!
Harvest by running your fingers over the berries, letting them fall into your bowl.
Harvest by running your fingers over the berries, letting them fall into your bowl.

 

These are the ingredients available in my yard today. I did not have enough American beauty berry or Turk’s cap fruits to make more than a pint of jelly. So, I took a chance on my pomegranates, which are HIDEOUS this year. I seriously thought they’d be rotted out and full of worms from the looks of them.

HOW APPETIZING IS THAT? I’ll show you the yuck after the recipe. Truly hideous.

INSTRUCTIONS ON HARVEST

  1. Grab a medium-sized bowl and run your fingers under the beauty berries to catch them. They are total escape artists.
  2. If you have any Turk’s cap, pop off the little apples. Then, if you are interested, pull off some flowers. Remove the green part and stamen right in the garden.
  3. You can eat the little apples and the Turk’s cap flowers. A bit plain, to be honest. The flowers are sweeter than the fruits.
  4. You can eat the beauty berries straight off the plant. They are so meh. Like an unripe persimmon. I mean, go right ahead. You won’t get sick. But they aren’t anything to write home about.

RECIPE

This part is hard because you aren’t collecting the usual fruits and berries. This is by no means a science.

I ended up with 1.5 cups of these wild berries, which is not worth my canning time. I added in some questionable looking pomegranates from my yard to get 4 cups of uncooked fruits. Despite their gross appearance, the fruit was fine in the pomegranates. Underripe, of course, given the time of year. But edible.

TO START

  1. 4 cups of berries (The beauty berries and Turk’s cap fruits are not sweet or particularly strong in flavor. If you have like a cup of berries, add a plain tasting fruit to the mix. Apple, maybe. I had pomegranates.)
  2. Clean them (no green parts) and boil down for 20 minutes. Add a few tablespoons of water at first so you don’t burn it.
  3. Mush the mix while boiling to ensure you get a lot of juice.
  4. Put a colander over a bowl. Ladle in the cooked mix and squish through to get what you can of the juices. You can wait until the mix is not boiling hot to do this.

CANNING STEP 1: Sterilize jars

You need to boil a couple of jars for 10 minutes to sterilize. I chose 2 pint jars and 1 half-pint. Just wash the lids in hot water and mild soap. Do not boil them. You’ll ruin the seal.

JELLY MAKING

This year I have been using a low-sugar pectin for a change. The amount of sugar required for regular pectin is terrifying. It’s been a bit of an experiment. For this recipe, I ended up using more sugar than recommended by the label to ensure a solid product.

  1. 3 cups of juice (I had to add water to get there. The mix was fairly pulpy, so the added water helped the texture.)
  2. Citric acid. You must make this mix acidic to ensure that it will jell and be preserved. I used the juice of 2 organic Lemon Drop citrus in my yard. Oh? You don’t have that? Then give up now. KIDDING. Get some lemon juice or something. The concentrate in the little plastic lemon will be fine. 2-3 tbs. Not too tart! Unless you like that.
  3. 3 tbs of low-sugar pectin. Whisk it in gradually. Otherwise you get a lumpy gravy. Rolling boil for 1 minute before adding sugar.
  4. Start with 1/2 cup of sugar, whisked in gradually. Rolling boil for 1 minute. Reduce to low heat.
  5. Get a spoon and put an ice cube on it to cool it. Stick it in the jelly mix. If after about 30 sec-1 minute on the cold spoon it isn’t looking very jelly-like, consider adding a bit more sugar. (This is the hard part. I had a really stiff grape jelly this year using the minimum sugar the product recommended. Use your best judgment. And don’t fret.)
  6. If the jelly looks decently thick (NOT watery, but kind of a syrup), you can stop cooking.
  7. Wait until it is not boiling hot so you do not burn yourself from a splash.
  8. Pour into the sterilized containers. (If you have extra, just grab a clean-but unsterile- container. Pour in, and refrigerate immediately. Use within a week or so.)

CANNING STEP 2: Hot Bath

  1. Place lid and rim around the jelly right away and hand-tighten. Don’t go crazy on the lid. You do want to be able to open it later, right?
  2. BATH TIME! Hard boil water–enough to basically submerge the jars. Then stick them in for 10 minutes (sea level). What happens if you don’t entirely submerge them? Certain death. Kidding! I’ve never had a problem. I eat my stuff within a year. If it looks or smells off when you open the container later, throw it out! Gross. Do not eat spoiled food. Crimeny.

CANNING STEP 3: Despair

  1. OMG. Lid popped and sealed. My jelly is not setting. I am going to cry! What a waste of time. GAHHHH! What do I do?
  2. Hmm. It’s no longer hot to the touch and still watery. I should probably still cry.
  3. Wait! I will put it in the fridge for a bit. ooo. It was fine after an hour. Despair over.
  4. Alternative scene: Oh no. Liquid. Overnight in fridge. I give up! We will have syrup for pancakes. (Good for you!)
  5. Alternative scene 2: Liquid? No. Not on my watch. (Crazy person) I’m opening these jars up and boiling again. More pectin. More sugar! I HAVE MADE A LOAF OF INEDIBLE JELLY. BOW DOWN TO THE BRICK. YOU EAT THE BRICK. EAT IT!

turks-cap-and-beauty-berry-jelly

 

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My pomegranates have suffered this year from the heavy rains. And vicious squirrel attacks. And sunburn.

A good part of the crop has been half-chewed by squirrels and has exploded due to excessive moisture. Exploded, chewed, burnt pomegranates. Ew.

I was surprised to see that the ugly balls actually have decent seeds inside. black-spot-pomegranate

They are underripe. Picked them out of morbid curiosity.

pomegranate-black-spot

Not one bit worm-addled. Huh. Still ugly as cuss on the outside, though.

 

 

 

 

 

Low Sugar Black Spanish Jelly

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Recipe

  • 4 cups of fresh grape juice
  • 1.5 Tbsp of low sugar pectin
  • 2/3 cup of sugar
  • As always, sterilize your jars in boiling water and then process them in a boiling water bath.
  • Consult the Kerr, Ball, and Martha Stewart websites for more detail on ingredient quantities.

In Austin and much of Texas, you can add a grape vine to your landscape without it looking out of place. There’s no one way to grow a grape vine. You can put in a trellis and have it climb up. You can head prune. So many ways to grow them. The important factor being that you trim heavily when the vine is dormant in the winter.

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Not the most spreadable of the jellies I have made.

I tried a low sugar pectin this year. I was cautious with the addition of pectin and sugar, but there were lumps I still had to remove. I think my reduced grape juice had a fair amount of pectin to start. Last year I just cooked the grapes down to a butter without pectin.

Anyhow, the flavor is better than usual jelly. It’s tart like a Fruit Roll-Up but not as chewy.

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Zinfandel grape vine

As you can see from the picture above, it’s easy to add a grape vine to a landscape. Some are more productive than others. I have had remarkable luck with the Black Spanish vine in most years. The hotter and drier, the more fruit it makes. It does well here because it is a native vine to the South.

That being said, a single zinfandel vine alone can make enough to fulfill your backyard grape needs. Black Spanish vines make sparse grape clusters, so you would do well with 3-4 vines. (I should tell you that I take a hands-off approach for native plants. I’m sure with careful viticulture that you would get better clusters.)

You have a choice here if your your yard is small. There are costs/benefits to both vines. We had an extraordinarily wet spring, which ruined the zinfandel crop. The Black Spanish produced as always. But in most years, I would just need the one zinfandel vine. You are at the mercy of Mother Nature. Whichever decision you make, be assured it will as right as it is wrong.

An additional note: You can eat the zinfandels from the vine. Black Spanish grapes are too tart and the skins too thick for table eating. Both clusters will have unripened grapes on them. That’s just the way it is. Chuck the green ones.

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Black Spanish makes a near-black jelly.

Or if you have zero interest in canning, you can walk out in the yard and eat the grapes off the vine while they are still warm from the hot summer sun. You can spit the seeds right into the lawn. Composting!

meringue-cookie

Turk’s Cap and Mexican Tarragon Meringues

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meringue-cookie
Fluffy and Crunchy!

What you’ll need:

  • A decent Recipe for meringue which will include: egg whites, pinch of salt, confectioner’s sugar, and if desired, cream of tartar to stiffen the peaks. Lots can go wrong when you make meringues. Have patience with both the whipping of the whites, inclusion of sugar, and low heat baking. It took me about 2.5 hours of baking at 170-200 to get the cookies to dehydrate and solidify.
  • A handful of Turk’s cap flowers
  • 4-5 Mexican tarragon leaves (also known as Mexican mint marigold)
  • Blender for the sugar and dried flowers
  • Parchment paper
  • Cookie sheet

I endeavor to use the plants in my garden, particularly the native ones, in my cooking. I’ll admit that I haven’t had a whole lot of luck with the Turk’s cap in past recipes because there isn’t much flavor there.

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One of the many flowers on this bush

I had a ton of egg whites left over from making an icebox lemon pie and had to find a use for them. I don’t care for plain meringues, so I began looking up flavorful recipes. That’s when it hit me: I could use Mexican tarragon for flavor and my Turks cap for color. Mexican tarragon has a slight anise/licorice scent to it, which I figured would add a nice fragrance to this plain fluff of a cookie.

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Mexican tarragon in my garden.

After picking the Turk’s cap, make sure to remove the stamens and any leaf parts that get in there.  They aren’t poisonous, but they will muddle the pink color. Rinse thoroughly to ensure all the little bugs and pollen have been washed off.

Meringue-cookie1

 

Next, you’ll have to dehydrate the tarragon and petals. I set my oven for 250 for 5 minutes and checked on the progress. It took me 15 minutes to get the petals nice and crispy. You’ll note that there is very little tarragon in there–maybe 4-5 leaves. It can become overpowering fast, so it’s best to use just a bit.

meringue-cookie-turks-cap-dehydrateThe next step is to put the confectioner’s sugar in the blender with the desiccated petals. The resulting mix should turn out sort of light pink depending on how many petals you used.

meringue-cookie-sugar
Make sure your petals are very dry or they’ll make a mess of the confectioner’s sugar.

Some bakers insist that you cannot make meringues in humid weather. You can, but you will need to cook them at a lower temperature and for much longer than the 2 hours most recipes provide. I started at 200 degrees, but my meringues started browning. So I turned the over down to 170 for the rest of the process.

Some meringues hardened faster than others. If they are still chewy when you take them out, you haven’t cooked them long enough. Visit Martha Stewart for more advice on meringue cookies.

Startled Stella

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startled-stella

I found this lovely dolly at Mercader Antiques in the Houston Heights. Oh, she doesn’t look all that scary in person. Like most of today’s celebrities, she’s been heavily Photoshopped. (Okay, she’s a total wreck in person, too.)

I’d been to that shop before a couple of years ago and noticed their rather extensive doll assortment. I hadn’t bought anything that time, regretfully. This time around, however, I was determined to find myself a really hideous mess to bring home.

In all honesty, this antique shop is totally normal and has nice stuff–including collectable composite dolls in good condition. I ended up grabbing a Patsy Ann doll. I had no idea who or what a Patsy Ann was. All I knew is that the doll looked like my little girl and was in fair enough condition that it was still cute as a button. Patsy Ann is hanging out with my adorable Claudette now.

At this point, I have so many composite dolls from the 1930s that I should probably learn how to clean them up. I learned last night that these dolls’ eyes get all jacked up and cloudy because that is what happens to acrylic doll eyes. I should just probably walk away from this idea, though. I have enough hobbies already.