What Do I Do With These Peppers!

Went down to the garden and I had peppers everywhere!  Green peppers, red peppers, yellow peppers, and orange peppers.  Peppers, peppers, and more peppers, lol.  Oh what to do?  I decided to get to work on the pickled vegetable mix and make salsa.   

I decided to pull out the crinkle cutter, which I use mostly to make crinkle cut potatoes for my grandson and cucumbers for my veggie trays to cut my carrots for the pickled veggie mix.  I almost forgot that I had this piece of equipment.  Shows how much I've used it lately.  It worked like a charm. 

I modified the recipe in the Ball Blue Book, and added cauliflower, red peppers, banana peppers, carrots, pearl onions and green peppers.  I love the color.  I think food should be fun as well as appetizing.  The recipe actually called for pickling cucumbers, but I didn't grow any and none of the grocery stores had any so they were left out of the batch. 

I added 8 1/2 cups of white vinegar, a few garlic cloves, a few dashes of pickling spice and boiled for 15 minutes.  The mix turned out quite favourable.  I used 1 chili pepper and 2 jalapeno slices per jar and this was the end result:  10 1/2 pints of hot, pickled veggie mix. 

I didn't put a dent in the chili, jalapeno and banana peppers, so I decided to whip up a batch of hot salsa.  Did I mention that love hot, spicy foods.  I was able to harvest a few Amish Paste tomatoes over the week-end, so I chopped those along with the yellow and orange peppers and added lots of hot peppers, seeds and all.  I had few red onions left, and tossed those in.  I love using Amish Paste and the Roma tomatoes in my salsa.  They're meatier, and make great chunky salsa.  The yellow and orange peppers made the batch festive and the chili peppers quite hot.  It was perfect!  I plan to make another batch and can pint jars to use in my holiday baskets.  My family has cast iron stomachs, even the kids love hot, spicy foods.  I have a 5 year old niece that loves Texas Pete hot sauce and fried chicken, lol.  I plan to make gift baskets for Christmas, which I will add a pint of salsa, the veggie mix, gourmet chips, home made cookies and some sort of jam/jelly. 

I decided years ago, to give homemade Christmas gifts instead of spending a fortune at the stores.  I refuse to contribute to the commercialization of Christmas.  I was able to can a quart and a 1/2 pint from this batch.  I didn't bother to seal the jars.  This batch of salsa will be gone by the week-end.