Best in Garden 2013: Peppers

I am truly surprised to report that my favorite thing from the garden last year was peppers. I was pretty enamored by tomatillos, it is true. But now that I am getting to the end of the canned produce, what really stands out is the peppers.

I truly felt panicked when it seemed like my pepper plants might not germinate. I cannot imagine a garden now without an entire bed of pepper plants.

What is odd about this is that if you were to ask me what foods I don’t like, at the top of the list would be peppers. Namely, green peppers. I don’t like ’em raw and I don’t like ’em cooked. But I don’t mean jalapeño or serrano peppers. Not poblano peppers. I don’t like those chunky, boxy green peppers that are ubiquitous in the supermarket and in lots and lots of American salads and dishes. I feel about them the way some people feel about cilantro– I don’t even like the smell of them.

This is why I started slow in growing peppers. The first year, I must admit, I dried and froze a lot of poblanos and then didn’t know what to do with them. I’d planned on throwing them in stews and stuff, but I forgot. Because peppers aren’t really something that comes to mind when I’m cooking.

Luckily, the director of the retreat center gave me a jar of red pepper sauce for Christmas, and suggested using it like a pasta sauce. It was delicious, and I was determined to make this and other canned peppers. I also went ahead and dried and ground paprika.

Freshly ground, home-grown paprika is not like paprika from the store. Recipes these days are often very specific about the kind of paprika they want you to use: smoky, Hungarian, Spanish, sweet… I don’t have a pantry with several kinds of paprika. And I haven’t been disappointed with my home-ground paprika yet. I just took down the third long string of peppers and ground them for summer cooking.

Rather late in the year I discovered I could use the pepper sauce, and when that was gone my single jar of roasted peppers, and when that was gone this one jar of pepper-leek-olive tapenade, stuffed in chicken breasts with grated zucchini. I also used that pepper sauce as a base on pizzas. I don’t think I could make enough pepper sauce to satisfy me.
I have found peppers pretty easy to grow. They like heat, but they’re not fussy about water like tomatoes. So far I haven’t had any trouble with blight or other diseases. You don’t have to worry that you’re splashing them with hose water and if they get a little limp, water perks them right up. They do need staking, but not a full-blown structure with vines tied up everywhere like tomatoes.

This year, I’m going to make as much red pepper sauce as I can. I’m gonna string up the paprika peppers, too. I’m also going to grind up my red thai peppers for hot red pepper. Why do I keep buying cayenne?? A bottle of Tapatio hot sauce lasts me years, so I’m not feeling the need to make my own hot sauce yet. But you never know.