Harvest Monday - November 15, 2010

It was slim pickings in the garden last week, but I did add a couple new varieties to the harvest basket. The photo shows the first harvest of Aji Angelo peppers (top) and the first Puerto Rico No Burn peppers (the small red ones in the center), plus more Espelette and Suave Orange peppers.

The Aji Angelo peppers were harvested from a plant that was in the garden last year. This variety is a mild baccatum pepper. The plant has been very resilient, surviving a couple of frosts in the open garden last winter and then a rather brutal transfer to a pot in the spring and irregular watering and feeding over the summer. Last year I preserved them by cutting them in half and removing the cores and then I slow roasted them in a 200F oven until they were crisp. The roasted (toasted?) peppers are excellent ground or flaked. Last week I made a batch of my eggplant bruschetta topping and crumbled a couple of the remaining dry peppers from last year into it. They added a nice sweet pepper flavor and pretty little flecks of red, but no heat. I haven't gotten around to preserving the latest harvest of these peppers, but will probably slow toast them as well.

The Puerto Rico No Burn peppers are a sweet cousin of habanero peppers. Unfortunately, the plants didn't like the cool summer weather that we had this year and set only tiny little pods, although a number of them have a surprising number of seeds. I suspect that even in optimal weather that the peppers will be small. These peppers are going into a batch of pickled peppers.

I preserved the Suave Orange peppers using the 200F slow toast method and you wouldn't believe how incredible they smelled as they were roasting.

Other than the peppers, the only other vegetable that I harvested was a bunch of Lacinato kale.

Here's the harvest totals for the past week:

Lacinato kale - 14 oz.
Aji Angelo peppers - 9.25 oz.
Espelette peppers - 12.25 oz.
Puerto Rico No Burn peppers - 2.75 oz.
Suave Orange peppers - 1.75 oz.

The total for the week was - 2 lb., 8 oz.
The total for the year is - 653 lb., 1.5 oz.

Harvest Monday is hosted by Daphne on her blog Daphne's Dandelions, head on over there to see what other garden bloggers have been growing lately.