I like my Christmas hot.
Growing up in Nigeria, we never really saw a white Christmas. In fact, Christmas coincided with this weather phenomenon called ‘harmattan’ – a seasonal trade wind that blew dust from the Sahara desert all across West Africa. So Christmas for us was brown, dusty, and hot. Yes, we could still keep wintery traditions alive by making sand angels on the concrete floor, but building sandmen was a little muddier…
I want to make sure that your Christmas is well rounded from an international standpoint, so I’m posting a recipe for a hot pepper jelly. The green color will look great on your holiday treat platters and the spicy-ness will carry your tongue to a land that lies much closer to the equator…
Jalapeño Pepper Jelly
Ingredients/Items
* Three or so green bell peppers
* Two handfuls jalapeño peppers
* 1 1/2 cups white vinegar
* 6 cups white sugar
* 1 pack (3 oz?) liquid pectin
* 8 Ball canning jars (8 oz), lids and new seals
Directions
Wash your peppers, jars, and lids. Put your jars in the oven to heat. Prepare a stock pot with either a cake cooling rack or stacked silverware at the bottom to prevent the jars from touching the bottom directly and add enough water to completely cover the jars that will go in there. Simmer.
Cut your peppers** into chunks, removing all seeds. Blend them with your vinegar in a blender until finely chopped. Pour into a stock pot with the sugar. Bring to a boil. Boil for 6 minutes then add the pectin. Boil hard for one more minute and remove from heat.
Carefully spoon hot mixture into hot jars. Wipe the lip and place the seal. Lightly tighten the bands around the seal. Place in water bath. Boil all jars in the water bath for 10 minutes. Remove and leave out to cool. Jars should seal. Any that don’t should be put in the fridge and consumed first. Any that do seal can be saved for up to 12 months.
** Wear gloves. Seriously.
| Posted in » Diving Bell and the Butterfly
I recently saw the movie, “Diving Bell and the Butterfly”, which then inspired me to go back and read Jean-Dominique Bauby’s book by the same name. It is quite an inspiring narrative, communicated and written by the blink of a single eye by a man who suffered from Locked-In Syndrome after a massive stroke. Bauby was once the editor-in-chief of Elle Magazine. Francine Prose of Newsday says of the book, “An admirable testament to the unkillable self, to the spirit that insists on itself so vehemently that it ultimately transcends and escapes the prison of the body.”
I know you blog readers of my aren’t into reading so much as you like looking at pictures, but for the sake of variety, I thought I’d share a chapter from the book. Read it if you ever get your hands on a copy. Watch it if you ever get the chance. Highly recommended.
“I’m fading away. Slowly but surely. Like the sailor who watches the home shore gradually disappear, I watch my past recede. My old life still burns within me, but more and more of it is reduced to the ashes of memory.
“Yet since taking up residence in my diving bell, I have made two brief trips to the world of Paris medicine to hear the verdict pronounced on me from the diagnostic heights. On the first occasion, my emotions got the better of me when my ambulance happend to pass the ultra-modern high-rise where I once followed the reprehensible calling of editor-in-chief of a famous women’s magazine. First I recognized the building next door – a sixties antiquity, now scheduled to be demolished, according to the billboard out front. Then I saw our own glass facade, airily reflecting clouds and airplanes. On the sidewalk were a few of those familiar-looking faces that one passes every day for ten years without ever being able to put a name on them. When I thought I glimpsed someone I actually knew, walking behind a woman with her hair in a bun and a burly man in work clothes, I nearly unscrewed my head to see. Perhaps someone had caught sight of my ambulance from our sixteenth floor offices. I shed a few tears as we passed the corner cafe where i used to drop in for a bite. I can weep quite discreetly. People think my eye is watering.
“The second time I went to Paris, four months later, I was unmoved by it. The streets were decked out in summer finery, but for me it was still winter, and what I saw through the ambulance windows was just a movie background. Filmmakers call the process a “rear-screen projection,” with the hero’s car speeding along a road that unrolls behind him on a studio wall. Hitchcock films owe much of their poetry to the use of this process in its early, unperfected stages. My own crossing of Paris left me indifferent. Yet nothing was missing – housewives in flowered dress and youths on roller skates, revving buses, messengers cursing on their scooters. The Place de l’Opera, straight out of a Dufy canvas. The treetops foaming like surf against glass building fronts, wisps of cloud in the sky. Nothing was missing, except me. I was elsewhere.“
YouTube Trailer for the movie:
Peanut Butter Krispies
My sister (Sara Beth – Market2Meal) and my best friend from elementary school (Kat E. – RhymesWithSmile) have food blogs that the regularly update with delectable recipes and menu ideas. I’ve been so inspired by their love of cooking, that I thought I’d share a recipe for a holiday treat on my blog too…
Peanut Butter Krispies
I have a love/hate relationship with this simple recipe. My mom used to fix these up for snacks and get-togethers when I was a kid. I adored their peanut butter sugary goodness, salivating at the mere thought of them…
But then the recipe got handed over to the cooks at the hostel I lived in while I was in boarding school. That’s where the ‘hate’ comes in. These became a regular snack menu item, which any youth should love, but they made one fatal mistake… Instead of letting the Krispies fall into organic shapes when they let them out to cool, they squished them into a shape that resembled a gigantic rat turd, and the result was not only unappetizing to look at, but almost impossible to eat. They became hard as rocks after a few days of sitting on the table and were more often launched through the air in food fights than they were eaten. My heart no longer raced at the thought of them and they were stricken from my kitchen for years.
Well, I think everything should get a second chance, so, now, almost 10 years later, I’m giving them another try…
In a big pot, boil:
1 cup light Karo corn syrup
1 cup white sugar
As soon as it gets good an hot, mix in:
2 cups creamy peanut butter
Then remove from heat and stir in:
6 cups cornflakes
Once the cornflakes are good and coated, quickly drop big spoonfuls of the Krispies to cool on wax paper.*
Allow to cool and consume.
* Don’t you dare squeeze them into balls! And don’t even think about leaving them out for more than a couple of days. And the calorie info? You don’t even want to know…
Oh, and if you think you can handle it, try drizzling melted chocolate over them. Ba-dang!
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Check out the recipes and ideas at Market2Meal and RhymesWithSmile! And for more culinary inspiration, browse around on one of my favorite food sites – Taste Spotting.
