What do you do when your buddy Timmy gives you four 5-gallon buckets of jalapeños? You get creative with jalapeño.

Never one to look a gift horse in the mouth, Hubby took Timmy up on the offer to pick some peppers, cucumbers, zucchini, and squash from his massive garden late this past summer. I was excited about the fresh produce and eager to give at least one new recipe a try. Little did I know I would soon be up to my eyeballs in stems, seeds, and researching ways to preserve the plentiful peppers.

Each day I spent 2 hours slicing and seeding peppers by hand for the first two or three days. These carefully crafted slices went into pickled jalapeños. Of course, I wore gloves to protect my skin from the spicy juices but my hands and wrists started to get a little worn out by Day 3. I pulled out my little Pampered Chef food processor and started blending away at the buckets of peppers, but didn’t make much headway because of the blender’s small capacity. Plus, I had moved on to trying a second new recipe. This time I was attempting to make jalapeño relish, and we weren’t too sure if we would like it or use it much. (*We did like it. ** We used it a lot.)

Hubby asked why I didn’t have a bigger blender. I told him because Santa hadn’t brought it yet. Well, Santa came in August with a fancyshmancy, BIG blender. It was going to be perfect for peppers, zucchini, slaw, all the things…. but it was really BIG. The jalapenos were plentiful but petite. This is when we really had to shake things up with how we sliced our peppers.

As any good farmer knows, there is always a right tool for the job. Hubby reached into his cargo pants, pulled out his vice grip pliers, and discerned that his gripping ability with the pliers was just strong enough to hold the pepper in place while reaching far enough into the safety shoot to get the “good” slices. Thank goodness for farmer’s ingenuity. Slicing still took a while, but Hubby helped and I had even more jalapeños to experiment with.

In the end, we made guacamole, variations of bacon-wrapped jalapeños (at least 8 times), a couple gallons of pickled jalapeños, 12 jars of jalapeño jelly, 8 jars of candied jalapeños, 8 jars of jalapeño relish, and a half dozen bags of frozen whole jalapeños. Needless to say, our meals have been a bit spicier this fall and winter thanks to the generosity of Timmy, Hubby’s determination to get the perfect jalapeño slice, and food being my love language.

This year I’m hoping to create more posts From the Farmer’s Table, and the first will be me sharing the jalapeño recipe that gets the most in the survey below. Be sure to vote for the jalapeño recipe you’d like to see most.

Which Jalapeno Recipe Should Melanie Make? Survey Link

Any way we sliced it, the jalapeños were a delicious and creative way to enjoy the bounty of a summer garden and try new things. I encourage you to take on the adventure of a new food or enjoy a fresh dish in this new year. We can’t put energy into our intents without nourishment and there’s nothing more positive than plating up something fresh.

By: Melanie A. Peters

P.S. We washed Hubby’s pliers before using them to prepare food. (I know you’ve been worrying about that the entire post.)