About Me

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I'm 41 years old and home educate my only son, we live with my partner of 10 years. I have a very supportive family and along with my mum we have recently opened up a shop on etsy selling our creations.

Tuesday 19 October 2010

A bad summer for the garden.

Although spring looked promising summer turned out to be quite disappointing with regards to growing veg.
I set out at the beginning of the year enthusiastic and planted my usual seeds, plus every year I try to grow some unusual varieties of Chillies, Tomatoes, Cucumber etc.
My favourite tomato variety this year was San Marzano, an Italian plum tomato that is very versatile, has very few seeds and is great if like us you like fried tomato on your full cooked breakfast.
I always like to grow chillies every year as all the family enjoys spicy food. This year however my harvest was slim to say the least, although we did manage to harvest a few chillies from the new variety I tried which was Lemon chilli, a hot variety with a slight citrus taste that we plan to use to create a Lemon chilli vodka.
Last year we just grew jalapeno chillies and the harvest was so plentiful that we quickly had to work out a way to preserve them. I made batches of my famous sweet chilli jam which I will talk about at a later date, we also made chutney, jalapeno poppers etc but we were still let with a huge quantity.
Mick, my other half decided he was going to try to make chipotles but we found that the mexican way of drying over smoke was too strong a taste for our english palette. We decided to come up with our own method which involves smoking, curing and drying and the results were absolutely amazing! We documented the whole process and put up an instructable about it which got featured and made it to their front page for a week.
Our Chipotles

3 comments:

  1. oh i do love tomatoes and sundried variety too but cant handle chillies, i wish i could as i love Indian and Thai cuisine...sadly i always request mild!

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  2. My hubby grew chilies, and had a large crop. My son absolutely loved them. I like the colors but don't eat "hot." Nice post!

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  3. Thank you for the comments :)
    The Chipotles are not very hot but give a lovely sweet smoked flavour, I'll be doing an article on sweet Chilli jam that's absolutely delicious!

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