Cooking Time! - Hell Yeah

Been some weather lately round these hearn parts, but I got the peppa back to our "Main Place" for the time being at - twas time to Cook the Goods!

OK - if you been following so to speak my progress on this garden season of ambitions in 2024, I’m thrilled to share this image with you! It is like a dream come true to me.

Picked each and every one of them peppa - and removed the stem from most of em.

~~~~~~ meanwhile yesterday ~~~~~~~

A pretty serious storm gave us a “glancing blow” and here is a bit of the outcome of that so I’ve been busy cleaning things up and making a repair in the porch roof, but mostly I’ve been thinking about my peppa product.

So here is the “setup” so to speak - super simple really. All I did was put the meanest hottest peppas (most colorful) that had been separated into the big pot you see there (it was purchased for home-brewing purposes but nobody said I couldn’t use it for cooking peppa!).

So what I did nice and simple is I hooked up the propane cylinder to the burner and I put the meanest hottest peppa I got in the big ole pot (6-gallon size I think - filled almost to the top at first) and then for good measure I added some vinegar (5% - about 1.5 gallons) and starting heating things up.

This is what it looked like in the process - near the beginning.

This was later on as I had boiled things down and know this - 5% vinegar means 95% water (basically) and the boiling temperature of water is what - oh come on everyone ought know - tis 212 degrees F (100 degrees C) - and the boiling point of acetic acid (the 5% constituent in vinegar) is 244 degrees F - 244.2 to be precise. Well - what this means in general is the water boils off preferentially at first and the vinegar remains in liquid solution.

So, while I was doing this the peppers were getting soft and releasing their “innards” into the solution and it seems the pepper heat was most soluble in acetic acid and just assume remain there - I can prove this because as the solution was boiling the aroma of both acetic acid and the peppa heat was minimal - ergo it was staying in solution as desired. I should add I worked at a facility produced cellulose acetate - so I know what acetic acid smells like - in pure form.

~~~~~~~

So I sat there and cooked the hot peppa and boiled off the H20 and now I have some serious peppa product in what is probably about 15% acetic acid (3 times concentrated - which means - how much water boiled off dear reader? - do you know - it can be calculated….but might be a bit trickier than you realize if you consider the water content of the peppa) and I intend on collecting the acidic juice first tomorrow morning after it has cooled - it will have product within - and then I’m gonna take the remaining peppa solids saturated in acid and put them in the blender and mix the living daylights out of them - wearing gloves in controlled environment and then pour that blended material into little jars for safe keeping and barter purposes.

In my humble opinion that the product has high barter value

I’ll share images of it here tomorrow - god willing.

~~~~~

Lastly, I test this pepper in the image below - the Golden P - it was the hottest one yet no doubt and I’ve saved some of the seeds and turns out I actually put the plant proper (shown in the previous article) in some soil after I pulled it out of the ground literally - roots and all - and the next day it seemed to actually still be alive. So, I got to get back to the getaway place to check how it is doing.

Meanwhile, at the getaway place there has been one of the worst floods since the 1940’s and power was out for everybody and I sort of feel bad I wasn’t there to share my generator power with my neighbors in need, but hopefully they are getting back on their feet and I intend on going there soon, and odds are they already has contingencies in place - cause that is the kind of place it is. Folks there are stout.

https://www.wdbj7.com/2024/09/28/this-is-worst-ive-seen-it-flooding-takes-over-fries-helene-moves/

Here is the peppa I tasted and you can see it has seeds for saving:

I put a bit of this in my mouth and being I’ve been testing the “peppa product” from all the different plants it didn’t take me long to figure out - this was the hottest one yet!

~

Hope everybody is hanging in there - exciting times we live in no doubt.

I am extraordinarily upset to hear about the killing of the leader in Lebanon. I suspect it portends difficult times for all of us - but mostly it portends the end of Isreal.

When some choices are made they are final - the choice to kill the leader of your enemy spells inevitable disaster for those chose in free will to kill another.

~~~~~~ as I said I would - here are the images ~~~~~~

First one is “product jarred” (per the above cooking batch), and the second is the next batch on the way.

Go Bills!

You win some you lose some - can’t win every game now - can ya? So sometimes in losing the best lessons get learned - what matters is learning one way or the other.

What did you learn today I inquire? I learned quite a bit myself - and that for me means today was a good day - cause any day you learn something is a day to remember, but any day you learn nothing is a day forgotten…..I reckon.

~

Best to all readers,

BK