Chili Pepper Wednesday

Growing your own chili peppers is easy. Sure, there's a whole science to it for those who want really big crops and all year around, but you can easily get a few plants to grow in your kitchen window in no time! This year in March, I planted a few seeds from  a red variety (so sad I don't know the kind!) that I had bought dried from an organic store. (We also planted the more rare variety bhut jolokia, aka ghost pepper, but more about that in a few weeks). Sure enough, we had a lot of little seedlings pretty soon.

They grew and they grew and we gave them bigger and bigger pots, until a bigger size couldn't fit on our windowsills. If we could have offered them bigger pots, they would most likely have grown a lot taller and wider. But they soon started blooming, and we went around playing bees and pollinating them with our fingers.

The flowers grew into green fruits, that would sit there maturing until suddenly one day turning red. The feeling of harvesting something from your own kitchen is amazing. After each plant had given us a first crop, they started producing flowers again, but this time a lot more! So right now we're in our second harvest. Easy peasy, the only thing you have to do is give them soil and water and they will give you spicy fruits!

Bhut jolokia peppers

Today we found ourselves with 3 ripe chili peppers, and wanted to do something fun with them, not just chopping them into the food. I found a recipe over at Melomeals for a thyme infused habanero sauce, and made some adjustments to make it fit our wants and needs. We used our 3 ripe red medium hot chili peppers and 4 not-so-hot sivri peppers. We used about half of the amounts of the other ingredients and followed the directions.

We tried it as a dipping sauce for spring rolls and on top of noodles, and it was really good! Sweet, sour, spicy (not so much though) and perfect for this kind of meal.