Even with the wet and cool summer we had this year, we still got a pretty decent pepper crop. We grew quite a few varieties -- many of our perennial favorites like gypsy, banana, anaheim, and jalapeno. The hot banana peppers came out pretty spicy, along with the jalapeno. One of our new favorites is a spanish frying pepper called pimiento de padron. It's a medium sized pepper with really good citrus flavor and some heat (cooler than a jalapeno but definitely noticeable).
We also grew bulgarian carrot, which turns a nice orange-yellow color. It's pretty hot but also flavorful. Hungarian black looks like a blue-black jalapeno and has about the same heat. Vietnamese Multicolor is a small pepper that starts out purple and graduates to cream, orange and finally red. It's a hot one, too.
But the hottest one we grew this year is a habanero-style pepper called jamaican hot chocolate. It is reputed to have an 85 day growing season (which is pretty short for a habanero). We didn't get any ripe fruit, but the green ones -- oh, my. I cut up a single small pepper to put in a batch of black bean soup, and it made a soup that is pretty freakin' hot. In addition, I made a big mistake -- I didn't wear gloves. That one pepper literally burned my skin. The worst-hit was my left thumb, which now looks like I got splashed with hot oil there. The oddest thing is that I didn't get a strong burning sensation -- it just felt like the thumb was covered with something stiff, like white glue. Capsaisin has interesting interactions with nerve endings so I figure the ones in my thumb went into hiding when the pepper hit.
We prepped up a bunch of our peppers last night, to make hot pepper jelly. It has a lot of hot peppers in it, but fortunately none of the jamaican hot chocolate went into this batch. We were planning on making a second batch that does use some of the very hottest ones, but are now rethinking that plan. I may just make a hot pepper sauce out of them, by brine-fermenting them and then pureeing them. That's an approach similar to how Tabasco sauce is made.
We also have harvested all of our winter squash. We just grew 3 different kinds this year -- cinderella pumpkin, sweet meat and gold nugget. The cinderella and sweet meat are very rich-tasting squash that we have grown before. The gold nugget is a new one, and we're not all that crazy about it. It tastes pretty "lean" -- not much sugar in it. Maybe it will sweeten up (some do). But so far it doesn't act like a "keeper", even though it supposed to be a winter squash that DOES keep well. Maybe that's because there's not much sugar in it to support mold or other decay mechanisms.
We're still pulling beets out of the garden, and may still get some cauliflower (maybe). We may get some volunteer asian greens to come back, and we have been eating volunteer swiss chard that has been coming up here and there around the house.
Finally, a story about our Siamese cat "Nibbles". About a month ago we noticed she was coughing a lot more than usual. At first we thought she was coughing up hair balls, but she rarely does that. Things developed to the point where she clearly was in severe stress and had a high fever, so we took her down to the emergency Vet. They initially thought she had some kind of viral/bacterial infection. So they gave her some antibiotics, kept her overnight on an IV to replace some fluids and her fever went down. We then took her home, for about 1 day. We kept an eye on her and saw that she was not improving -- in fact, even worse, acting distressed and having a lot of difficulty breathing. So we went back in to the emergency vet. We had to call on one of our neighbors to help out, because we had wine for dinner before we decided to take her in & didn't want to drive. Good neighbors are a great thing to have. Anyway, she went back in and they x-rayed her, found lots of fluid around (not in) her lungs. They say she had some kind of penetration from her lung into the lining, and it was full of nasty stuff. They drained out about a cup's worth of bloody serum, and put her in a high-oxygen environment to help her breathe. And did IV antibiotics.
After several weeks' worth of antibiotics (administered by mouth), she is pretty much back to normal, but we figure that we almost lost her that weekend -- twice. A lucky (and now even more expensive) cat.
