Author Archives: Megan

Drying Hot Peppers

Posted in In The Kitchen by

I guess I didn’t realize how prolific my Chinese 5 Color hot pepper really was until a few weeks ago when I harvested all of the remaining partially ripened peppers. There were a lot of hot peppers. I tried to eat as many as I could fresh, but I could only tolerate eating a small portion of them in fresh salsa without the peppers taking over the entire flavor and burning my face off. I like burning my face off a bit, but I love the taste of home grown tomatoes more, so it was taking a long time to use up the extra hot peppers. Then last week I noticed that some of them were starting to wrinkle, so drastic measures were in order. I considered freezing them whole but then decided to try drying them to make my own hot pepper flakes for adding into chili during the cold months.

Drying peppers is unbelievably easy. I don’t have access to a dehydrator so I wasn’t sure how well drying them in the oven would work, but I was pleasantly surprised when my peppers came out dried and a nice deep red color after a few hours.

Here’s how I did it:

1.Preheat the oven to 200 degrees Fahrenheit (adjust for your oven – I have an older electric oven that runs a little high so I put mine at about 175)

2. Wash and dry the peppers thoroughly. It’s okay if they are wrinkly!

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3. Remove and discard any stems and cut the peppers in to smaller pieces. My peppers were fairly small to begin with so I cut them in half but I did have a wrinkly Joe E. Parker that I threw in but cut into pieces about the same size as the small halved peppers. I included all of my pepper seeds but you can remove and discard these if you want a milder end result.

4. Spread in a single layer on a baking sheet (I used a parchment covered sheet)

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5. Dry in the oven for around 2 or so hours, checking every 30-45 minutes and adjusting the time as needed. They need to be completely dry to store properly. Mine took around 2 1/2 hours.

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6. Remove from oven and let sit for an hour or so until completely cool and dry. I let mine sit overnight because I was being lazy.

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7. Crush using a mortar and pestle if you have one, otherwise you could try a spice grinder or just crush them using a spoon – whatever works.

8. Store in an airtight container.

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So easy and so delicious. Also the drying peppers will make your house smell so amazing for those few hours. Do you have other methods of preserving your hot peppers?

An End to The Week From Hell

Posted in 2014, Home Projects by

Things are starting to get back to normal after my terrible week of broken dishwashers (the verdict is in, it is dead forever), a migraine that wouldn’t end, and an emergency basement clean up & reorganization! I couldn’t be happier that the week from hell is over. We spent every week night cleaning, moving things around, making a big expensive trip to Ikea (with the help of my favorite little brother!), then building said Ikea, and finally putting the whole space back together in a much more organized manner. Saturday night was spent vegetating in front of the television before falling asleep about 45 minutes later (it could also have had something to do with the leftover Halloween candy binge I’d gone on earlier).

Through all the crap this week, I have been able to find some positives:

1. Yesterday morning we met some friends for an early lunch and then stopped at my favorite store in historic Inglewood, Plant, where I picked up a couple of new air plants as well as a few little vessels for my ever growing collection of cacti and succulents (if you’re ever in the area stop by my favorite knitting store too, Stash). Fall is a weird time for me because I think I start to get a bit of indoor plant fever – I’ve just gone from caring for a million plants in my garden to only caring for a few in my house so I always feel the urge to increase the indoor plant population around this time. There are truly worse things I could be doing.

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2. I’ve also been trying to make some headway on a few knitting projects. I’m officially 1/2 way through my first Xmas gift and about 1/10 of the way through my first sweater (actually a shrug, but whatever), and about 30 minutes away from finishing a pair of slippers for myself (the jury is still out on whether or not that project was a success… I think I’ll need to make some adjustments to the pattern for next time). I’m also trying to finish up a cross-stitch project I started almost a year ago (a year!!! Really Megan?!!) and I’m so close. Maybe today will be the day? I really like to take on too many projects.

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3. And then I decided to “save” another discarded item. This chair was in pretty rough shape (dirty and very rusty!) when I picked it up but I figured there was no harm in trying to bring some life back in to it – and also, I was looking for another chair! I spent a couple of hours scrubbing using some steel wool and some Barkeeper’s Friend and it is looking much better – the chrome base shined up really nice! I’m still waffling on replacing the upholstery – it is faux leather so I think adding real leather would be much nicer, as well as fairly inexpensive and would require very little time. Thoughts? It is a nice chair so I’m glad I was able to clean it up.

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Other than that, it started snowing yesterday afternoon and hasn’t really let up since (maybe not a positive thing but it is pretty!). So I haven’t had any time to work on finishing re-finishing my little sewing table (although I have no idea where I would have found time anyway). I’ve also been looking at the powder room all week dreaming about finishing sanding the drywall, so I’m hoping to get that finished by the end of the week.

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And somewhere in between all of that I’m going to work every day, eating and sleeping. I’m feeling much more optimistic about this week though, maybe next post I’ll have a finished project to share – fingers crossed!

Habanero Hot Pepper

Posted in 2014, Harvest, Vegetables by

I honestly thought that I would hate the Habanero pepper and that I would want to die immediately after eating it. Rated 100,000 – 350,000 on the scoville scale, I was frightened. Afterall, I could barely stand to eat the Chinese 5 Color hot pepper that I grew and it was rated far less on the scoville scale than the Habanero. But at the same time, I felt like I needed to at least try it. And I’m so glad that I did. I loved it.

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The words seem surreal as I type them – I love the Habanero pepper and it was absolutely my favorite hot pepper this year. Let me explain a bit – the flavor of the habanero is truly unlike any other hot pepper that I grew this year. They have a very sweet flavor with a bit of smokiness and although the heat is fairly intense, it subsides quickly and leaves you feeling very satisfied. Instead of reaching for a glass of milk or shoving popsicles into my mouth, I didn’t need anything to relieve myself from the heat. Now maybe either I’ve burned all of the taste buds off of my tongue or my peppers weren’t actually that hot – I don’t know. I felt like I should have been clutching my stomach in the fetal position while crying. Also, I should mention that I removed all of the seeds from my peppers before eating them which would definitely lessen some of the heat in the peppers. But all in all, they were very hot and pleasantly delicious.

I should mention some of the things I wasn’t thrilled about. This pepper took the longest amount of time to grow and produce ripe peppers. My seeds were started last February in the house and were moved out to the greenhouse in May. The plant didn’t produce flowers until about a month later than all the other peppers and then it seemed to take forever for any peppers to appear. Once they did appear, they grew very slowly and in fact, I ended up having to move the entire potted plant back in to the house a few weeks ago as the peppers were just starting to ripen and the nights were below freezing temperatures – the last thing I wanted to do was to lose my precious peppers to frost. Also, the one plant only produced two peppers – one a decent size and the other quite small. Despite this, I will try growing this pepper again because the flavor was so amazing. I’ve also purchased some Mustard Habanero seeds to try out next year and I have my eye on the Chocolate Habanero pepper as well (who am I kidding, I will order those seeds in a couple of months).

And now for the best part – fish tacos with fresh mango habanero salsa. So good. I’d never made fish tacos before, even though pork tacos are a weekly staple at our house. This recipe was killer – you can find the fish tacos recipe here (I omitted the slaw in place of the salsa) and the salsa recipe here. I will absolutely be making this recipe again, and it was a perfect use for the peppers.

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That brings my pepper posts to an end for this growing season. I’m so excited that I finally had some good success with growing peppers (thank you greenhouse!) and I can’t wait until the next season. I’ve already started a few peppers in the house (really, really hot ones!) and I have a list of other peppers I’d like to try – so basically my entire greenhouse will be just peppers next year – I can’t wait!

Habanero hot pepper seeds purchased from Botanical Interests.

A Big Set Back

Posted in 2014, Home Projects by

You know that feeling you get when you start something on your to-do list that has been on it forever? And you think you’re going to finally be able to finish it? That’s how I was feeling Saturday afternoon. Several months ago, I salvaged a little sewing table from the community centre dumpster (it was actually beside the dumpster, so it wasn’t gross). The table was in great condition but had a horrible botched paint job and was missing the sewing machine. I felt like I could easily repaint the table and I wasn’t broken up about the missing machine. I shoved the table in to the corner of my living room with the intention of getting to it in a few weeks. A few weeks turned into a few months and then on Friday I finally declared that I would start and finish the table this weekend. I know this was pretty ambitious as I’d been battling a migraine all week but dammit, that table was getting done! And at the same time, I also declared I would have the powder room drywall primed by the end of the weekend (this also included time for finishing sanding the drywall). Ambitious? Yes I am.

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Photo of the dumpster table before I started stripping the paint – it doesn’t look too bad but up close it was a total mess. Cat snuck in the photo as well.

I should have known looking back on the week’s events that I was being delusional. A week ago Sunday our dishwasher decided to stop draining and has been out of commission ever since. Then with the migraine. But no, I chose to ignore all of the signs that I should not attempt projects and went and got ahead of myself. Things started out pretty well – on Saturday I woke up early and was feeling pretty good, so I ran some errands, went out for an early lunch to the ramen noodle place, then came home and got started on stripping the paint from the table. It was much more labor intensive than I expected (I’ll post a full before & after eventually), but I finished the stripping and figured I would finish the table on Sunday. In between that, I also had an opportunity to do some work on the drywall and would be finished that on Sunday too. That is, unless of course something horrible were to happen in the meantime. And it did.

I was sitting down on Saturday night after spending all afternoon scraping and sanding to watch some Gilmore Girls (entire series just added to Netflix Canada!) and do some knitting (I have to finish those Christmas gifts!). My husband went in to the basement to do some organizing – he runs a business selling vintage men’s clothing outside of his day job so we have a lot of inventory in our basement. Shortly after he entered the basement, he reemerged saying something like “I found something disgusting that I think is ______ and I need to remove all of the carpet”. I will not get in to details because you do not need to know. I will say that it was not a pest infestation of any kind but may have been a result of one feline with severe separation anxiety. Enough said. It was disgusting and thank goodness our basement is unfinished (with the exception of one room which had a large piece of carpet and some lovely 70’s faux wood wall paneling). Also, thank goodness none of the inventory was affected. So our Saturday night turned in to moving everything out of the room and ripping out the carpet. Sunday turned in to scrubbing the entire room (walls and floor) several times over. Any chance I had of finishing the table and drywall was out of the question.

So what now? I’ve got several things planned:

– Organize the basement. Currently it looks like a tornado went through. But this week everything will be going into plastic containers and we’re going to be buying some free-standing Ikea wardrobes for additional storage. The good thing about the whole ordeal is that I can finally get things organized and clean down there. The bad news is that I have to clean down there.
– Give the sewing table a sanding and then begin the painting process
– Give the powder room drywall the last sanding and then prime it
– Clean and organize the rest of the house. Because we dedicated all of Saturday night and the whole day Sunday to sanitizing the basement, we had to move a lot of things upstairs in to the kitchen. Then with the dishwasher out of order, several cupboards had to be emptied in order to access the plumbing lines (a dishwasher was a later additional to the house so things are a bit weird), so the insides of those cupboards are on the floor. To sum it all up, the house is a complete disaster and I’m not sure how long I can live with it before I go insane.

Am I getting ahead of myself again? Probably. But I’m hoping that I’ll be able to dedicate a few hours every evening to accomplishing these things. It just means I won’t have any time to dedicate to finishing up the garden to-do list I posted about last week.

Unfortunately this horrible discovery amounted to a few things financially as we’ve had to plan to purchase quite a bit of additional storage including large plastic storage containers, shelving and some big wardrobes. It also means that the money we were planning to spend on other things has needed to be reallocated. First, we had wanted to purchase a new fridge to replace the one that died a couple of months ago (the mini fridge has been fine and will continue to be fine, but we have to do several small grocery runs weekly and can’t buy anything in a larger size in fear that it will not fit in the fridge. I’ve become a master at making things fit in the mini fridge!). Second, if the part we ordered for our dishwasher does not end up working, we will not be able to buy a new dishwasher for several months, which means washing dishes by hand. Not a huge deal as a dishwasher is a luxury but one I have become accustomed to.

I’m hoping that our terrible house luck has come to an end now. I think we’ve had our fair share of mishaps. I am also considering us fairly lucky – for all of the terrible things to happen, at least these are ones with fairly simple solutions. See, I’m being positive about something!

Next time I’ll have a much happier post with pretty pictures to look at! I guess this is a blog about my life so it would make sense to talk about the not-so-fun parts of it as well – not everything can be pretty gardens and delicious recipes all the time.

Autumn To-do List

Posted in 2014 by

Autumn has made an appearance, however brief it may be. Although the weather the last few weeks has been ideal, I know it isn’t going to stick around for long. To avoid falling into the depression and negativity trap that often comes with this time of year, I am doing something that gives me a ridiculous amount of joy: making lists. It probably shouldn’t be something that I love as much as I do, but whatever, I am who I am. So with that said, here are some of the things on my to-do list that I feel like I need to accomplish in the next few weeks:

– The wheelbarrow. I’ve been talking about the damn wheelbarrow all summer. It is finally painted! Now I need to put it back together. But somewhere along the line I lost one of the bolts. Luckily this had happened prior to me taking it apart to paint it so I didn’t just lose it because I was being careless with the pieces when I disassembled it. This also explains why it wasn’t working so well when I was using it to haul 5 million yards of mulch around my garden. It does mean that I need to make a trip to Home Depot to attempt to find a match for the missing bolt. Sigh.
– Clean the shed. Again. Things just get thrown in there and eventually everything small falls on the floor but you can’t reach to pick anything up because there are pointy metal rakes and other dangerous gardening tools all over the place (we recently acquired 2 antique saws that could dismember someone if they were to trip and fall onto them that are also being housed in the shed for now). We thought that by building a gigantic shed we would actually solve all of our storage issues. WRONG. Dad if you’re reading this, I think we need another shed. Just kidding. Half kidding.
– Clean the greenhouse. I’ve already half done this. And then I started storing things in it because like I mentioned above, apparently my shed is not big enough to store all my crap.
– Paint the front door. It just needs a fresh coat. It could survive without it because it still looks fine, but I’m borderline OCD and notice all the little imperfections everywhere.
– Empty the rain barrels and put away the hoses for the winter. One of my least favorite jobs – it’s right up there with cleaning the litter box or filing my taxes.
– Finish cleaning up the raised beds and add a layer of compost.
– Cover the big pieces of outdoor furniture. Normally these would go in the shed but read above. So instead I am going to buy some neutral colored tarps and cover them – so much easier!
– Empty and wash all of the ceramic pots and then store them for the winter. I’m almost finished this and I’ve started to store them in the greenhouse but it takes awhile when you have as many pots as I do.
– Make garden maps. I have this on my to-do list every year and it never happens. The point is, I always forget what I have growing in the perennial beds and I’d also like to make note of things that should be moved or divided in the spring. The intention is there but we’ll see if this one happens.

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Snapshot of the current garden – not much going on. The chicken wire fence was supposed to be temporary back at the beginning of the growing season to keep the nieghborhood cats and squirrels away but it has stayed up all year – maybe next year we’ll construct something a bit more attractive.

The outdoor list is pretty manageable and I’m confident I will be able to accomplish most, if not all, of it. But when it comes to indoor projects, well… that list is a bit longer but I’m focusing on two major projects. I’ve got months and months of being trapped indoors ahead of me and I want to get started with a plan so I don’t just fall into the couch/Netflix trap (it is so tempting).
– Finish the powder room we started renovating back in May. If in January I haven’t shared the powder room, it means I’m being lazy and you need hassle me in the comments section.
– Major knitting project (a cardigan). I only started knitting for real about a year ago – I knew the very very basics before but it was pretty pathetic. Then last year I started some group lessons and I’ve learned an unbelievable amount and I’m ready for a real challenge. I’ll share the progress on here but if you’re a knitter, I would love to hear some wisdom. Or general cheering me on is also welcome because I’ll probably be very frustrated and/or perfecting my colorful language skills. I’m not sure if the actual project will be that difficult, just time consuming – but actually focusing on one project will be the most difficult thing. Mental note: do not look at Ravelry or knitting magazines, you will become distracted.

And of course, I will begin planning for the next gardening season! My wish-list is already like 50 new varieties long so I’m going to have to make some decisions (or else find more gardening space somewhere)!