Chilies and peppers

 

Nominations for the greatest smells of fall: woodsmoke on a cool morning, aspen leaves, apple butter cooking in my kitchen, and finally (perhaps most importantly) chilies roasting. We love chilies at our house. Walt says he remembers the first time he ever ate anything with chilies in it – a taco sometime around 1962. It was not, to hear him tell it, love at first bite. His eyes watered and his nose ran and he thought he was being killed from the inside out. But all that changed as the years went by, and my husband became a big fan of every kind of chile under the sun.

That’s a lot of different chilies. There are Mexican chilies, Thai chilies, Hungarian chilies, chilies from the world over. We like them all.

I start the plants in March in the sunroom. Chilies take a long time to grow, so it’s best to start them early or buy plants already started. We plant lots of different varieties – jalapeño, Serrano, green peppers, purple peppers (they taste like green peppers; they’re just prettier), Hungarian, ancho, and any others that look interesting in the seed catalog.

I plant them on the south side of the house where they will get lots of sun and heat. Once they are planted, there isn’t a lot to do except keep them well watered and keep the weeds down. I also mulch them with grass clippings.

The nights are getting cool lately, so the other day it was time to pick the end of the chilies and make the last batch of salsa. When I do this, I pull up the chili plant, cut off all the chilies, and throw the plant in the burn pile. They don’t compost well.

After picking the chilies, I roasted them on the grill. By the time I’d peeled all the tomatoes, and cut up all the onions, the chilies were cool enough to get the seeds out. Remember, don’t scrap off the roasted parts, just cut off the stem end and pull out the seeds after roasting.

Summer is done and fall is upon us. I love fall, but I will miss fresh chilies until next summer. I can enjoy them, though, every time I open a bottle of salsa. See the salsa blog for any recipes.